2020 Book APerformativeFeelForTheGame

CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY
A Performative
Feel for the
Game
How Meaningful Sports Shape
Gender, Bodies, and Social Life
Trygve B. Broch
Cultural Sociology
Series Editors
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Center for Cultural Sociology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Ron Eyerman
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
David Inglis
Department of Sociology,
Philosophy and Anthropology
University of Exeter
Exeter, Devon, UK
Philip Smith
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Cultural sociology is widely acknowledged as one of the most vibrant
areas of inquiry in the social sciences across the world today. The
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Culture is not simply the glue that holds society together, a crutch for
the weak, or a mystifying ideology that conceals power. Nor is it just
practical knowledge, dry schemas, or know how. The series demonstrates
how shared and circulating patterns of meaning actively and inescapa-
bly penetrate the social. Through codes and myths, narratives and icons,
rituals and representations, these culture structures drive human action,
inspire social movements, direct and build institutions, and so come
to shape history. The series takes its lead from the cultural turn in the
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embody the spirit of cultural sociology as an intellectual enterprise.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14945
Trygve B. Broch
A Performative Feel
for the Game
How Meaningful Sports Shape Gender,
Bodies, and Social Life
Trygve B. Broch
Inland Norway University
of Applied Sciences
Elverum, Norway
Cultural Sociology
ISBN 978-3-030-35128-1 ISBN 978-3-030-35129-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8
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To Camilla
Series Editor Preface
When teaching about sex and gender the sociologist will typically look
to the anthropological corpus. Examples from cultures where they “do
things differently” are used to decouple biological sex from socially con-
structed gender roles. The Indian hijra and the Navajo nadle are familiar
exhibits in this cosmopolitan tour. With their assistance, western classifi-
cations and behavioral norms that have been inculcated since childhood
are suddenly rendered arbitrary and fungible in the minds of students.
Assumptions are destabilized and, normatively, a space is opened for
rethinking gender, power, and patriarchy.
In this book Broch ingeniously turns the method upon sports sociol-
ogy. It is not our students who are in need of the jolt that might lead to
creative, critical rethinking but the academic field. Over recent decades,
the sport/gender research nexus has assembled a remarkably impres-
sive and internally consistent body of work of monumental proportions.
Hegemonic masculinity is enacted in sport. The sporting values of phys-
ical prowess, toughness, and endurance are coded as male. Sport in turn
reproduces the gender order. Women’s sports are devalued. Women who
excel in sport are trivialized or seen as deviant and dangerous. They vio-
late the cultural codes of womanhood. Few could disagree that this is
the approximate lie of the land. But repetition has somehow naturalized
and familiarized what should be made anthropologically strange. The
connection between the cultural codes of sport and those of the gen-
der order is arbitrary, not necessary. The point is often made but case
study after case study seems to underline in a somewhat formulaic way
vii
viii SERIES EDITOR PREFACE
how they are irrevocably glued together. Now it is the sociological com-
munity that conflates the sports code with the gender code, much as in
everyday life sex and gender are fused. For habitual thinking to end they
need to be taken apart.
Broch’s exhibit is not an “exotic” culture that can be easily seen and
dismissed as “other” or as a dying anachronism outside of modernity but
the prosperous, Caucasian European nation of Norway. He shows how
in the case of Norwegian handball the sports/gender code is flipped.
Women embody resilience, determination, and the capacity to take pain.
It is the men and the boys who are critiqued as wimps, who lack tough-
ness, and who fail to measure up. They have to learn to play like girls.
This is no telescopic reading of discourses but rather a study of how
shared circulating meanings penetrate from the media sphere down to
everyday life. In a deep ethnography of two youth teams Broch shows
just how sport and gender are reconfigured in the micro-details of every-
day life: In ponytails and sports tape; the minibus and the locker room;
in bragging and sandbagging. And if he shows sport is all about gender
he also shows it is not just about gender. It is also a realm of drama, per-
formance, fun, creativity, effort, and excellence. There is an element of
the sacred and of enchantment. All too often sports sociology has rushed
to make sense of the negative social consequences of sports. In so doing,
it has run straight past the socially relevant, sociologically fascinating
meanings that offer motivation and enchantment in the life world. Let’s
face it, reproducing the gender order is probably not the reason anybody
shows up for training on a wet Thursday night. So why do they? This
book has many of the answers.
Gender/sports sociology has been tremendously successful but it has
become predictable and complacent. Like an aging Olympian it is rest-
ing on its laurels. By turning away from the canon of sports sociology
with its somewhat predictable citation patterns and towards the foun-
dational resources of more general cultural sociology, Broch is able to
see and theorize things afresh. And so this book is more than a study
of Norwegian women’s handball. It is a wakeup call to a sleeping giant:
Now is the time to lace up those sneakers and get back to work.
New Haven, CT Philip Smith

October 2019
Preface
The project presented in this book started in 2007 when I was writing
my master’s thesis and later advanced on to the Ph.D. program at the
Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH). Twice I had traveled to UC
Berkeley where courses in feminist theory had tested my naïve imagi-
nary, and Messner and Sabo’s work had brought to life the reproduc-
tion of the gender order of sports. Doing my Ph.D., this perspective was
cultivated in the sociology sessions held by my supervisor Kari Fasting
and her colleague Mari Kristin Sisjord. At NIH, they made an impact
and effort to inspire critical thinking and acting. As a result, my criti-
cal Ph.D. study was presented at the 2009 ISSA conference at Utrecht.
A “Norwegian Big Bang Theory” of the explosive sounds of men’s
handball. A hand in the crowd was raised and its owner asking, “what
if the women playing the game are also aggressive and violent warriors?
Is the gender order still rebuilt?” Yes, I answered him and in a critical
and Connellist fashion I was right. A year later in Oslo, anthropologist
Noel Dyck criticized my analyses in a very similar and polite way, but I
kept returning to my critical theories and the same reply. Yet, very slowly,
these kind questions and indeed my own repetitive answers were becom-
ing more and more problematic. Inspiring conversations with supervisor
and handball enthusiast Lars Tore Ronglan on sport’s micro dimensions
and with Peter Dahlén about media and mythmaking had me wondering
about alternative readings of handball and gender.
The project moved on from media studies to ethnography. In the
field, at the youth sports arena, social life was complicated. As the Ph.D.
ix
x PREFACE
period was winding down, cultural theory embracing ambivalence was

knocking on the project door. I had started rethinking. The compara-
tive potentials in studying both men and women athletes in the media,
boys and girls at the arena, had severely shattered my beliefs in the clarity
of critical theory. I had been wrong and needed to find the right tools
to advance. Spring 2013, I returned to the USA and to the University
of Notre Dame where a sharp and kind reader helped me advance my
thinking and all the same told me to finish the Ph.D. and then look
ahead to cultural sociology. Thanks to the UND Department of
Sociology and Terence McDonnell’s workshop, I had a great time before
I followed Lyn Spillman’s advice to return and defend my Ph.D. at NIH,
October 2014.
Moving on, I explored the epistemologies of critical and cultural the-
ory that had been hidden. Anthropological notions of play were joined
with sport studies in trying to fathom how meaning-making in sports
is carried out—how meaningful sports can shape gender. Lyn had put
me in contact with Jeffrey Alexander who invited me to his Centre of
Cultural Sociology (CCS) to develop my analyses. Håkon Larsen, Åse
Strandbu, Ørnulf Seippel, Kari Stefansen, and Hans Erik Næss allowed
me to think cultural sociology aloud in Norwegian books and journals.
In 2016, with a position at Hedmark University College, Dean Sven
Inge Sunde and Public Health Department chair Linda Lundsbakken
decided to invest in sending me off to the USA once more. A Fulbright
Scholarship realized decisive funds, but also a great moral and informa-
tional support before and during this new adventure. Bags packed, and
regardless of all this backing, there would not have been another US
adventure, now for my family of five, without considerable family sup-
port and the strength of Camilla Broch, the newly made mother of our
twins. I am in great debt and thankful to all who helped me on in various
ways.
Settling in at New Haven, I was poised to rethink, think deeper and
think in dialog with my earlier texts—from a new angle. The compar-
ative potential of the project that had disappeared from earlier critical
texts, in which it was not needed due to the binary thinking inherent
in gender theory, could now be used to the gains of broad cultural
insights. A revised “Big Bang Theory” needed data from women’s
handball. Deep meanings, which had not previously been accounted
for was excavated with the emotion and meaning-oriented theories of
PREFACE xi
the strong program at Yale. The intellectual hub of the CCS center, the
support of the center administrator Nadine Amalfi and Yale University,
Department of Sociology made the icing on the cake. At the CCS work-
shop, primed graduate students, Jeff’s elaborate observations and Phil
Smith’s snapping precision made a perfect ending to each week. Here I
also got to know Jean-Pascal Daloz and be inspired by his great enthu-
siasm for a sociology of variation and distinction. Talks with Anne-Marie
Champagne, Ian Sheinheit, Till Hilmar, Vanessa Bittner, Adam Valen
Levinson, and Pål Halvorsen also influenced this book.
Finally, yet importantly, my family had long nourished an interest in
culture and taken every opportunity to criticize my use of critical theory.
Daily talks, for many years, with my father Harald and sister Tuva Beyer
Broch, both anthropologists, kept inspiring a curiosity for cultural pat-
terns and all its colorful variations. Perhaps long overdue, I realized that
my two Ph.D. supervisors at NIH, Lars Tore and Kari, had placed me in
a fortunate squeeze between a micro and macro sociology of sports. Lyn
Spillman showed me how I could take advantage of this cultural-sociol-
ogy space and incorporate my taste for anthropology in exploring how
meaning-making shapes social life. In the final phase, I am truly thankful
to Phil Smith for taking interest and time in guiding a process of pre-
cision and poetics of a prospective cultural sociology of sports. Thanks
also to Palgrave Macmillan, especially editors Mary Al-Sayed, Madison
Allums, and the two attentive reviewers who sturdily guided the project
to its very end. Through the ups and downs of it all, I am greatly in debt
to all those who supported me. Without all this academic and everyday
support, this project would have not have been. Any inelegances are of
course my own responsibility.
Elverum, Norway Trygve B. Broch

Contents
1 Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender 1

The Challenge of the Critical Theorist: Gender as Perspective 5
Meaning-Making and Sport: Play and Game Theory 9
A Cultural Sociology of Sport: Culture as Perspective 14
Methodology 19
Outline of the Book 22
References 29
Part I Media, Sport Enchantment and Gender
2 Media and Sport Enchantment: Narrative, Myth,

and Games of Modernity 43
This One’s for the Record Books: Game Dynamics
and Storytelling 44
Entering Enchantment: Sensing the Mythmaking Vortex 51
Transcending Time: Handball and Viking Warriors 53
The Generative Grammar: Cognitive Simplifications
that Shapes Sport 61
The Bang: Codes Generating Vocabularies and Iconic
Consciousness 70
References 77
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
3 Enchanted Fusion: Bringing Together Game Play

and Gender 83
The First Sex of Norwegian Handball: The Iconic Women
Warrior 84
The Second Sex of Norwegian Handball: Playing Catch-up? 95
References 106
Part II Socialization, Sport Felicity and Gender
4 Throwing Like a Handballgirl: Performance

and Materiality 113
Handballgirls in the Making, Part I: Performances
Shaping Materiality 115
Handballgirls in the Making, Part II: Sensing a
Meaningful Universe 122
Performative Repetition of Toughness: The Problematics
Kindness 129
Being Snill on the Handball Court: When the Match
Gets Underway 132
Sporting Emotions: How Culture Structures Shape Feelings 135
The Gendered Significance of the Smile 140
References 144
5 Throwing Like a Handballboy: Enchanted Flows

of Power 147
Reimmersion in Youth: Teens and Parents in Dreaming
Disarray 153
Agency and Choreography: Carving Out Stages for Serious Play 159
The Size of a Handballboy: Corporal Materiality and Meaning 166
Moral Guardian of His Rational Actors: Individual Flows in
Culture 173
References 183
6 By Way of Conclusion: A Cultural Sociology of Sports 187

Reconciliation and Looking Ahead 194
References 199
Index 201
List of Tables
Table 2.1 The handball code delineates the sacred and polluted

aspects of the meaningful game 70
Table 3.1 A schematic comparison of the empirically informed
culture structuring of handball (the handball code)
and the theoretical gender structuring dominant
in critical sport and gender research 88
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender
During the 1970s the Norwegian handball federation decided to invest

in their female players. In their talent-pool, women outnumbered men by
two-thirds and the best female athletes were far closer to the top inter-
national level than the men were. When Norwegian handball made its
decisive breakthrough with a World cup bronze in 1986, attention was
focused on the women. Not all the game-parts of this quiet 1980s revo-
lution were televised but the strategy was visibly paying off. 33 years later,
27 medals richer, 12 of them gold, the team draws about 1.6 million view-
ers in their country of about 5 million citizens. Until recently, the men’s
team has resided in the shadow of the women, with only scarce media
attention and still being outnumbered in the federation. Despite their
brave participation on the global stage, in comparison to the first sex of
Norwegian handball the score count remains 27 to 2 medals. Named “the
almost team,” the public imagination has long defined the men handball
as the second sex of the game.
How does the meaning of sports intersect with gender? Critical theo-
rists have answered this question in plenty. They hold that gender is about
inequality, conflict, and the rational pursuit for power. Sports mirror this
social reality, they argue, and proceed in critique. Indeed, sports do cre-
ate inequalities, a ritualistic separation of winners from losers. Contest is
at the very heart of its organization and makes it tempting to forge realism
with criticism. But, sports are also about cultural mastery, of belonging
and emotional impact. Sports carve out worlds filled with magic, drama,
and irrational significances. This enchanted prospect not only shapes its
© The Author(s) 2020 1

T. B. Broch, A Performative Feel for the Game, Cultural Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_1
2 T. B. BROCH
organized play but also its power over gender inequality and social action.
Sports are part of our projects of solidarity, never fully obtained yet shared
attempts to use codes, myth and narratives to shape moral action. Mean-
ingful sports are the achievements in which actors deal with conflict and
solidarity in ways that can sustain its actions. It is here, in the interpretive
drama of sport that its emergent force to shape the material and gen-
dered life resides. Sports meaningfully intersect with gender at its many
junctures of solidarity and conflict. We need both sides of the story and
document its clashes. Such will be my argument.
Numerous critical theorists have studied sports as narrative, ritual, and
performative. After the cultural turn, they have used these concepts to
stoke “the utopian and dystopian imagination of the reader.”1 In elo-
quent ways, they have got at the polluted inequalities that surround and
saturate sport. Fruitfully so, a wealth of research documents how sports
were historically produced by men, for men, to breed patriarchal mas-
culinity. Today they still often start out and end with this thesis of sports
as male preserves and women athletes as contested terrain. To the point
in which analytic results have become predictable and scholarly efforts
seem to have fading returns. Critical theory or cultural Marxist sociol-
ogy, has thus become problematic and in need of a cultural sociology,
or a new-Durkheimian sociology, to balance the books.2 Certainly not
the functionalist Durkheim postulating ritual consensus but one that is
rebuilt in the light of a cultural sociology of how meaning is, at times, a
messy realization.3 Paradox, dynamics, and contest—variation, creativity,
and breaches must remain central to the study of power. My way to get at
this is by revitalizing a set of modalities used by the cultural theorists of
the past to show how sport, play, and games allow us to question inequal-
ity and shape freedom. A cultural sociology of performance allows us to
study how cultural codes, myth, and narratives enter the sport experience
through play. The result is a deeply interpretive alternative studying how
webs of significance mesh sport and society on the court.
Barthes (2007) argued that sport is a social theatre in which actors and
audiences share in cultural experiences and analysis. Sport is both dead
serious and lighthearted play. Its outcome is unknown. Participants, like
real-life actors, try to balance the tension between social organization and
creative freedom. Universal game rules allow sports to be played glob-
ally, in spite of the national, cultural, and personal diversity of its actors.
Freedom in play permits contestants and observers to give global sports
its local flare and individual dazzle. Classical theorists, from Huzinga and
1 INTRODUCTION: SPORT, MEANING AND GENDER 3
Caillois, to Goffman and Geertz, said that game play allows meaning,
attraction, and immersion by felicity.4 It generates magic and mystery by
giving everyday life a new form. With play theory, enchantment and felic-
ity again become central pieces to how sport puzzles society. Still, we can-
not ensue analyses of sports in some old school humanities drones. Pro-
ceed to theorize or celebrate an ideal human condition by looking for a
universal of our imaginative capacity and wonderful civilizations. The clas-
sics assist our twisting and turning of sport, our looking for contemporary
readings of its bodies and actions. This is where it ends and where a cul-
tural sociology of sport begins. Athletes and onlookers are always taking
account and ignoring, being pulled toward action and pushed away from
another. Driven between the poles of boredom and involvement, we are
seduced and repelled by our conceivable worlds of meaning. Performance
theory allows us to reveal how this happens, how particular cultures elicit
specific passions and guide actual choices by actors and spectators at the
sport theatre. We do not have to prioritize inequalities over freedom or
the social over meaning. If meaningful sports are culturally contingent,
we are left at the edge of our seat to play sociological theatre critics of
how sport shape gender.
Through the empirical lens of Norwegian handball, the global
sport/gender-nexus is twisted in ways that allow us to pursue blind spots
and challenge the alleged universality of prior studies. The critical the-
orist too quickly loses track of possible democratic ambitions in sports.
The non-apologetic, non-gender-bending, tough women athlete is barely
conceivable. Her democratic man colleague has gone missing. In Norway,
handball has the merit of being a women-dominated sport in a country
that makes it a point of honor to place the principle of gender equality at
the basis of democracy. From the 1980s, on swells from the 1979 Law of
gender equality, from the 1981 first women Prime minister and the 1984
male President of Norwegian sports strategizing about recruiting women,
Norwegian handball rode the waves of the women’s movements and the
huge expansion of the welfare state. With an anthropological proclivity, I
am teased to imagine how these cultures can possibly have shaped gender
power. How the image of the triumphant handballgirl , situated in one of
the world’s most gender equal countries, has made her the unapologetic
first sex of the game. How the handballboys , the men’s team, are seen in
the light of this idealized example of woman toughness in pioneering for
equality.
4 T. B. BROCH
I place this nexus of a democratic myth and the daily experience of

handball in Norway at the center of a thick description to reveal how
the culture structures of the sport intersect with social interpretation and
athletes’ embodiment. Two levels of analysis must therefore be articu-
lated and then interwoven. On the one hand that of the media narrative
that participates in building and circulating a certain “public meaning”
of handball in majority ethnic Norway. On the other hand that of body
cultures and how handball practitioners make sense of this “public mean-
ing” in the everyday acts of the sport. In other words, part one of the
book explores gender equality in media texts on women and men elite
handball. I join journalistic interpretations of game play with empirical
and theoretical readings of Norwegian culture. A curiosity for gendered
solidarity and belonging propels the study of how competent journalists
understand and value women and men athletes. In part two of the book,
I aim to bring you along into the youth sports arena to answer if and how
the broad meaning formed in the media flows into the socialization and
skill acquisition in youth sports. Here, we can find out how actors flexi-
bly manoeuvre symbol-systems and myths disseminated by the media. An
interest in how public meaning and body culture fuse allows a study of
how situated action feeds off and feeds back into the maintenance of our
webs of significance.
While most authors either carry out a media study or an ethnography,
this book does both to look at how meaning about sports and within
sports circulate and flow between the two. There are strings attached,
deep existential questions that are attempted answered, and that will
present us with the not yet seized upon prospect of an ethnographic veto.
Sports do not inherently reproduce social and bodily inequality. Sports
also reproduce democratic projects and experiences of flow. Some might
disdain any relevance of the unusual and very Scandinavian case and it
is hard to disagree completely. Yet, a pursuit of thick description reveals
how sport and gender studies also need to deal with how actors ques-
tion inequality and shape equality. How local-national culture intersects
with gender as landscapes of meaning are brought to bare on our use of
sports to reflect on society. The ways in which meaning-making processes
shape gender power should be an empirical question. Cultural theories of
meaning, diversity, and solidarity can turn out to be crucial parts of our
gender-analytic toolbox. For the reader with a curiosity for theory, con-
ceptualizations are next up. For others, I suggest stopping by the one-stop
shop about handball and then jump to the outline of the book.
The Challenge of the Critical Theorist:

Gender as Perspective
After separating biological sex from gender and in the advent of feminist
theory, we could clearly see the meaning of patriarchy in the landscapes
before us. Armed with the gendered perspective, powered by currents
of radicalism in the postwar era, feminism exploded “a social-democratic
imaginary that had occulted gender injustice” and transformed society
root and branch. As its “utopian energy” declined, feminism was drawn
into the “orbit of identity politics” to reveal how difference distorts recog-
nition. These three dramatic acts, as Fraser (2013, p. 1) names them, has
forever changed our view on social life and gender justice.
What the gender outlook does so well is to fuse the intellectual’s polit-
ical philosophies with social life as lived and experienced. These modes of
awareness inform each other with the result of improving theories of good
and bad, and to make practical changes in social life. Yet, the remarkable
political impact of the gendered sight, can be costly for the interpretivist,
Reed (2011) argues. Meaning and action come to be soft variables, best
explained as by-products of the hard variables the scholar is evaluating.
With goals of a non-patriarchal ideal, the gender theorist can go straight
from a political macro-truth to its personal micro-effects, ignore the wills
of actors and the meanings that possibly mediate broad social categories
and injustice.5 The advent of intersectionality theory has indeed made
great gains in pushing the study of diversified injustice.6 By stressing how
various sociological inequality categories stack on top of each other and
add up injustice, meaning structures still do not interfere with the critical
theorists’ train of thought and causal reasoning. This claim needs back-
tracking.
The critical sociology of gender, linking gender to feminist theory,
argues for a universal and inescapable gendered reality of social life. Its
only proper parallel, Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (1992, p. 311)
argue, is found in Marx’s discovery that knowledge—what people assume
to be absolute truths—are in fact the realities of those who economically
and politically rule the social world. Studying gender, men are the power
holders that shape knowledge about masculinities and femininities. This
unifying thesis does not take away from a vibrancy of inter and cross-
disciplinary ways to reveal gendered oppression. A vast methodological
tool kit shows us how patriarchy is endlessly recycled in actors’ negoti-
ation of masculine and feminine stereotypes. Its emphasis on patriarchal
6 T. B. BROCH
power, for any analysis of the social world, has made gender, in and of
itself, a means to perceive social life altogether. With heuristic intents,
I have lumped them together as the gender perspective seeing culture
through the lens of patriarchal meaning and power. Inequality scholars
in general, tend to think in this way as they study how external, objective,
and material forces breed injustice via hegemony, domination, subordina-
tion, Alexander (2007) argues.
While cultural sociology explores how codes, symbols and narrative
allow meaning-making, the gender perspective emphasizes how the social
power relations of gender constrain symbols, narrative, and meaning. For
example, the Scandinavian scholar Nielsen explicates how gender con-
strains social life by creating difference and hierarchy. Drawing on Beau-
voir and Hirdman, she argues that gender scholars “go out looking for
differences and place these differences in a hierarchy in which the mas-
culine is normative, and the feminine is marked as deviant.”7 Indeed,
the cultural turn has spurred an axiom that gendered power is histori-
cally dynamic and culturally diverse. Varied cultural action is, nonetheless,
evaluated by importing empirical evidence into a static model, originating
outside the studied lifeworld, that places masculinity and femininity in this
fixed relation to each other. From every possible angle, the critical theorist
shows how inequality saturates life. Micro scholars West and Zimmerman
argue that actors’ interaction is held hostage by gender.8 The patriarchal
norm set sanctions encounters as right or wrong in light of the interac-
tants’ sex category. Macro hegemony-theorist Connell shows us how cul-
ture aids inequality by bringing reproductive differences into broad social
processes.9 Culture persuades the social dominance of women by men,
by naturalizing unequal masculine and feminine ideals. These works from
the 1980s have later taken up intersectionality trends to show how patri-
archy is realized globally despite of local and social diversity.10 Butler, on
the other hand, gives agency to a performer, but in similar ways, leaves
the actor only to repeat or bend stereotypes that make bodies percepti-
ble as gendered in manners well known.11 This view makes gender the
structuring structure of social life to show how meaning and diversity is
organized by masculine and feminine stereotypes.
To the gender scholar, sport is a crucial example of how universal gen-
der inequality-dynamics works.12 Sports, they claim, prove how culture
sustains masculine and male power. This doxic truth, its seductive clarity
and daring, has bred a subdiscipline of sport sociology, methodologically
varied indeed that powerfully details sports’ cyclical inequality-dynamic.13
The discipline has fused patriarchy and sport to the point that it is almost
impossible to tell them apart.14 Men reproduce male privilege through
aggressive acts, whereas women have to apologize for acting aggressively.
More precisely, boy and male athletes, as well as journalists depicting
them, reproduce male power through authoritative, heterosexual, and vio-
lent acts and challenge male dominance through passive-aesthetic, met-
rosexual, and considerate acts.15 Although women have entered sports
in huge numbers, this only contests men’s numerical dominance. Sport
remains male dominated since also authoritative, aggressive, and violent
women symbolically reproduce masculine values—and thus validate patri-
archy.16 At the same time, aggressive women are found to act apolo-
getic to reinstate heteronormativity through feminine markers such the
ponytail.17 The gender perspective thus reassures us that sports create an
inescapable and double bind dynamic in which competition is synony-
mous with patriarchal renewal. In Theberge’s ethnographic account of a
women hockey team, she argues that the Blades do constitute a power-
ful challenge to masculine sports, but that in doing hockey, “the Blades
accommodate those very interests they challenge on the ice” (2000,
p. 158). While Theberge used hegemony theory, also Bourdieu and Fou-
cault, through notions of doxa and discourse, have inspired analyses that
manifest how meaning and bodies interlock with patriarchy.18 If the the-
oretical notions of masculinity and femininity matches well with data, the
critical theorist has exposed a culture that reproduces inequality. If not,
they have revealed a culture that challenges inequality. Usually, it is hard
to pinpoint if the challenges to patriarchy outweighs reproduction. Crit-
ical theory labels these cultures as ambiguous. Methodological variation
has not challenged this axiomatic truth of cultural Marxism in gender and
sport sociology. In Norway, both the generalist Nielsen cited above and
the sport specialist remain engaged by the evaluative model of patriarchy
in mapping out inequality.19
When critical sport sociologists explore national identity and gen-
der, an even more dreadful picture of an inescapable global patriarchy
is painted. Unconcerned with civil and folkloric inputs, intersectionality
theory turns national identity into an additional inequality form, nation-
alism. Knoppers and Anthonissen (2003, p. 353) argue that the creation
“of (a national) sport as an activity in which (absolute) physical per-
formance is given a central place and that is dominated by males has
8 T. B. BROCH
become a major (global) site of patriarchy, male bonding, and the sup-
port of an athletic masculinity.” Regardless of the many women repre-
sentatives, their almost equal time in the Olympic limelight, the media
are still found to depict nations that exclude women and ethnic minori-
ties or embrace them in ways that support masculine hegemony.20 Wens-
ing and Bruce (2003, p. 390) note that medias “accommodate” success-
ful sportswomen at global events by ignoring their “stereotypical female
inabilities.” Women Olympians are empowered by (polluted) nationalist
ideologies and are always threatened by compulsory heteronormativity.21
Making “women” equal to the symbolism of inability, passivity, and sub-
ordination, critical theorists show that any sign of ability, aggression or
power breed patriarchy through these agreed upon masculine signposts.
The critical analytical circle, now accounting for national identity, is whole
anew, in an even more forceful version. Seeing sports through the lens of
gender breeds the same results worldwide. Capitalism and nationalism
catalyze the patriarchal inequality process. In fights for gender equality,
this daring clarity of the cultural Marxist has made huge gains. Its success,
powered by aims to combat hostile culture-components, has fought dis-
crimination and endlessly strives to make sports a more healthy enterprise
by surgically stabbing at cultural ills.
The problem, perhaps, is not being critical but the limits of the sharp
critical theory criticism proper. Philosopher Gumbrecht (2006) argues
that intellectuals feeling obliged to critique sports as a symptom of the
undesired larger and more powerful systems of oppression have belit-
tled and denounced its aesthetic dimensions. Several anthropologists have
despaired the reduction of sport to inequality categories and to mystify-
ing values in the service of the oppression inherent in universal sociol-
ogy models.22 Sutton-Smith (1995, 1997), claims sport sociologists cre-
ate false binaries as they show us that sport recreates a modern world
of women versus men, of corporations versus workers, of tradition ver-
sus modernity, of freedom versus compulsion. With a different tactic, he
suggests, ambiguity in the reproduction of a priori categories might be
explained as actors’ flexible altering of pragmatic potentials. Sports are not
simply pathological conformism to competition but also about aesthetic
excellence. It is not merely a reflection of social inequalities but a means
to reflect on unequal societies. Its attraction comes down to our flexible
capacities to play out analogies to social life through sports. Ethnogra-
phers that do not define themselves as sport sociologists, argue that sports
are about belonging and meaning. While critical theorists have reported
on the contours of sport inequality, these ethnographers have dealt with

its qualities. What are these qualities? What makes the sports kettle bub-
ble with anticipation? What makes codes fizzle from our cultural depths
to burst out in the meaningful sport experiences that form gendered life?
Meaning-Making and Sport: Play and Game Theory

How should we define sports to allow a meaning-centered analysis? Cul-
tural sociology grants actors, groups and culture a relative autonomy from
the inequality and power structures that critical theorists use to decon-
struct empirical worlds. This uncoupling allows us to look for empirical
patterns and build structural accounts of how meaning shapes social life
and power. Binaries, narrative, and myth are empty at the outset and need
to be fitted out with empirical meaning. The result is an analysis explain-
ing how individuals and collectives are guided by empirically infused,
yet universal culture structures as they manoeuvre situations. Inequal-
ity becomes addressed, critiqued and amended by actors. Socialization
and skill acquisition turn into a meaning-making in which broad culture
shapes bodies and action in many ways. We need a conceptualization of
sport allowing us to fit out its modalities with empirical meaning.
In the elementary forms, Durkheim (1912/2001, pp. 280–285)
showed how an ideal society arises through assembly and settles on sym-
bolic and material forms in ritual, dramaturgy, totemism, play, and games.
These meaningful actions shape social life. As such, sport as ritual-like
and separate from everyday life, provides actors a greater leeway to play
with symbols that evoke, interpret, and reshape bodily experiences and
social lives. Huizinga’s (1938/1950) work can be read as a refocusing
of Durkheim in which play takes the place of religion and civilizations
thus evolve from and unfold in play. He expounds play as voluntary,
unproductive, a symbolic breaking down of social categories, and a goal
in and of itself. Romantically he mused that we are absorbed in play by
its prospect of shaping material and social realities uncorrupted by social
life and power. Yet play not only shapes societies, it is fundamental to
the individual’s development of a social self. Mead (1934/2015) claimed
that a child’s creative adaptation of roles and symbols is developed dur-
ing play with ideas of something or someone. Looking into the mind,
through culture, Winnicott (1971/2005) argued that play provides are-
nas, from infancy to adulthood, in which we use materiality and symbols
10 T. B. BROCH
to ease the separation from, connection with, and addressing of the other-
ness of social reality. Play agency, Winnicott maintained, is directed at the
achievement of omnipotence. Typified by the baby fusing materiality and
meaning to shape a favorable experience of social life. Inevitably, babies,
children, and adults’ attempts to control social life quite often fail. Still,
play enables us to study how meaning shapes materiality, action, and social
life as we join in experiences with culture. Play aims at fusing objective
external realities with subjective and bodily experiences. The play process
allows us to sense explicit and tacit meaning, surface and deep culture.
Winnicott but also Bateson (1972) paralleled play to psychotherapy.
Both take place within a delimited space, time and framework of percep-
tion. These spaces occur as we define acts as play (psychotherapy) and if
we “fall into” this middle reality that structurally allows us to alter individ-
ual and social meaning. What is specific to the play form, and its modal-
ity, is its condensation of the expressive forms we find elsewhere. Geertz
(1973a) thus used play to theorize how a society’s pivotal emotions, hier-
archies, and moralities are cast in symbolism. Aesthetic transformation,
he argued, awakens an inclination for mindful and unconscious reading.
If deep cultural patterns align with the surface of action, we experience
deep play. Barthes’ (2009) work on wrestling, a true product of moder-
nity and commodification, jog our memory that aesthetic transformations
of social life still provides an intensified appearance of reality, regardless
of its obvious choreography. The play transformation, of act and audi-
ence, is crucial to grasp modern sports, Shore (1996) holds. It reveals the
important often unspoken ideas and experiences of social life. As a civil
ritual, sport joins freedom of participation with a formality of the strict
goals and rules that arranges its meaning-making. Freedom to question
the social is allowed by the play modality that in unison sets its practices
apart from but also anchors it in mundane life. Dealing with play, we
cannot shy away from deep interpretation.
Sport do not contain ideal-typical free play but should be seen as com-
petitive games that invites us to play.23 To Caillois (1958/1979) sports
are institutionalized competitive play with formal rules and strategies that
are organized by the social structure of the game. In this democratic
project, players are given an apparently equal footing at the outset. It
demands focused training, personal dedication, a desire to win, and to
declare an untainted champion. While play is antagonistic to boundaries,
games are practiced through this formal and social control that furnishes
ideals of civility. It develops our abilities to be involved in interaction
whereby shared goals minimize conflicts between one’s own and oth-
ers’ attitudes. From this idealistic lesson, important notes arise about how
games introduce ideas and meanings about materiality and social life that
are not our own, but that, if accepted, enable us to play together in a
relationship.24 Shore (1996) argued that games, like scripts, are standard-
ized templates for well-defined, goal-oriented or pragmatic situations. The
game’s socio-structural universality enables interaction across cultural and
individual diversity. It contains global action-scripts.
Games do help actors and audiences forecast how play can develop,
to anticipate, but without extending the foresight indefinitely (Simmel,
1911/1971, p. 354). For Elias (1970) games allow us to measure and
establish relations in which a player’s strength always varies in relation to
her opponent. Fine (2015) later advanced this insight, beautifully naming
chess not as a contest, but as duets developing through lines of play.
Bodily knowing by routinizing games thus cannot dismiss our ability to
play and read actions. Contrary, it allows leeway for plausible creativity,
to transform and break with the routinized patterns of the game itself.
Athletes must read images and fine-tuning emotions (Beauchez, 2018a).
Games join intuition of social patterns with the reading of body contours
and social rhythms. It tests our joining of technical skills, creativity
and aesthetic reading abilities in reimagined, rule bound, and simplified
settings.
It is here, along the contours of the game that we find the mem-
brane that both contains its own loose logics and allows some broad
social meaning to enter, while others are repelled. In the organized play
of sports, we find codes that generate its worthwhile and goal-oriented
action. Institutionalization does not devoid meaning-making. Spillman
(2012, p. 181) argues that the pursuit of organized goals “ultimately rely
on collective identity and solidarity.” None withstanding the unlikelihood
of consensus, institutional actions are only meaningful if we have or can
develop shared strategies for action.25 The game removes disorder but
demands that we center our attention and act with a total, emotive and
meaningful play-involvement (Collins, 2004; Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Yet
its interaction cannot escape broad and private meaning. The game mem-
brane is not a given but an achieved social force. Goffman (1961) argued
that games are only rewarding when we are absorbed by and at peace with
the choices that are made within the game. Games are unpleasant when
we dislike the meaning-making that takes place and lose the capacity for
immersion. Individual and shared realities are thus often introduced in
12 T. B. BROCH
masked form, through mimicry or aesthetic transformation. Its actions

do not mirror but modify socio-cultural and personal realities to fit well
with game objectives. It both conceals psychological and social worlds
and attempts to reveal the right amount of information that gamers can
cope with.26 Realities are softened and exaggerated. Sustained game inter-
action, felicity, is the meaning-making by which personal, cultural, and
social dimensions are carefully introduced.27 It is always threatened by
choice and broad social dynamics. As a result, we have to stop the crit-
ical theory jumps straight from broad to individual meaning and starts
looking into felicity.
The combination of play and game in sport helps us to see sports as
commentary and sensation, as interpretation of and emotional shaping of
social life. These modalities that reshapes social life in an alternate form
allow globally shared, yet nationally and locally varied sports. Classical
theorists paved the way for us to see this. To see how sport is a cul-
turally contingent play organized by the game structures allowing global
sport-interaction. Sports are worthwhile because they satisfy the need to
interpret and shape social and personal life through play. It begs us to
play along with the aesthetics that evoke deep cultural feelings. This is a
major part of sports’ gravitational pull and cultural force.
What is Handball? A one-stop shop
Men and women’s handball has been a regular part of the Summer
Olympics since 1972 and 1976, respectively. It is primarily played
in Europe but also some East Asian, North African, and South
American countries. North Americans at times mistake handball by
its namesake resembling the racquet-game squash. As a primer, it
should be noted that handball is usually played indoors by teams
of seven on-court players and seven substitutes. Consequently, the
game has been dubbed “team handball,” “European handball,”
even “Olympic handball.”
According to the International Handball Federation (IHF) and
the International Olympic Committee, handball has more than 27
million players worldwide. In many northern and continental Euro-
pean countries, handball is a highly rated participant and spectator
sports, especially as the top men and women from domestic leagues
meet in the Champions League and come the European and the
World Cups played every other year. Major domestic leagues are
today located in Germany and France but also Denmark. Some top
teams, for example Hungarian women’s team Gÿori, are also attrac-
tive to players from abroad. Elite players and teams are sponsored
by widely recognized brands like Adidas and Nike but also well-
known European brands like Hummel, Puma, and Umbro. Often,
domestic and national teams wear sponsor labels on their jerseys as
a major source of income, like Füchse Berlin’s men team waring a
Lidle emblem on their shirtsleeve.
Handball is sort of like basketball crossed with soccer and with a
hint of hockey aesthetics. It is a rapid game with a ball in hand, fre-
quent turnovers, shots at goals. Skills include throwing fast and with
accuracy, blocking the ball and opponents, speed, and agility. At elite
levels, players are expected to engage in body checks, jumps, and
diving activity to shoot or block shots. This often involves landing
on a hard floor with hips, knees, shoulders, and other parts of the
torso hitting the ground first. This is sometimes painful and risky.
The referee oversees the act and hands out yellow cards, two-minute
suspensions, and a red card for various violations. If an attacker is
fouled in the act of shooting, a penalty shot is given.
When it comes to executing the game, for adult players the game
consist of two halves of 30 minutes and you can expect about 40–
50 goals divided between the two teams. Somewhat like basketball,
players can only run three steps and have one series of dribbles
before they have to pass the ball to a teammate. The ultimate aim is
to throw the ball into a small soccer-like goal that has a goalkeeper
guarding it. With a court measuring 40 by 20 meters, on-court play-
ers speedily transition from attack, via fast breaks to defense and
back on the attack. Team positions on the attack include wingmen
on each side, three backcourt players in the middle, and a pivot that
is usually placed among the opposing defenders’ defensive line to
set screens and take close-range shots. On defense, the same posi-
tions are more or less kept as they, in various formations, align in
a defensive wall outside the goal crease drawn six meters from and
in a half circle around the goal and net-minder. You can easily find
14 T. B. BROCH
info about the game on Wikipedia, game instructions and highlight

videos in general YouTube and its IHF channel. Doing so might
help you understand this book.
A Cultural Sociology of Sport: Culture

as Perspective
To avoid the pitfalls of late Durkheim (1912/2001), and at the same
time challenge the nonsymbolic approaches of cultural Marxist analyses, I
follow Alexander (2017, p. 3) in studying meaning-making in modernity
“as resting upon social performances rather than rituals per se.” Classical
theory has made us attentive to how play is the gateway through which
actors and audiences immerse in the dramatic game plot of sports. This is
what makes sports enchanted, captivating, and not simply a mechanistic
behavioral mode. Play and game scholars saw this but were thrown out
with the critical sociologist’s bathwater. To make their ludic theorizing
competitive to the hegemonic stance in gender and sport studies, we need
a new-Durkheimian study of how empirically infused structures shape the
social and material worlds of sport.
A break with our inspirational, classical and somewhat romantic
humanities narrative on play and creativity is crucial. In complex het-
erogeneous societies, culture is segmented and differentiated—meaning
is defused. A study of meaningful action-patterns therefore needs a the-
ory that joins broad culture and situational pragmatics. For this reason,
Alexander (2004, p. 529) merged performance theory to cultural soci-
ology to reveal “the social process by which actors, individually or in
concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation.” A per-
formance is an agentic meaning projection that brings codes, narratives,
and myth to action. It shapes truths by joining realism and symbolism,
material facts and dramas. The actor does not have to obey the mean-
ing she wishes others to believe but needs to convince herself and her
audience of the performance’s importance. The dramaturge is trying to
understand and direct action by a seamless stringing together of broad
culture and situational action. To do so, the actor needs habitualized and
creative acting skills to serve rational and transcendental aims. There are
therefore two sides to seeing sport as performance. Sports join knowledge

about the game and about society. It is an institutionalized play act and a
social performance.
Meaningful action involves more structural factors than any one
inequality-category (or its intersecting) can reveal. Alexander (2004)
argues that a successful performance re-fuses collective representations with
an immediate script. Actors and audiences use various means of symbolic
production to put culture in action and sway the social power invested in
the situation. All these elements of performance have to come together
in an agentic concert. As in real life, a sport performance is set apart from
“theatre” as actors do meaning-making in stride toward an open con-
clusion that appears to be “theirs to make,” wilfully and by chance. The
global fact is that the game script is leading to a conclusion. From here,
athletes use their acquired game skills on a quest in which nobody “really”
knows who will be champion or if an athlete will astonish us by denying
“social or nature’s forces” along the way. The script allows actors to use
props like sports tape, face paint, and padding as they draw broad culture
and moralities into play. It shapes heroes, villains, and styles of play as we
act out local meaning to make global game scripts walk and talk, sprint
and cheer to our various social passions.
Sports range across a field encompassing media, international and
national federations, local clubs, small groups, and individuals. For that
reason, a cultural sociology of sport needs to be open for a multidimen-
sional analysis. Within institutions, we find culture structures that gen-
erate vocabularies and narratives that direct specialized actions in more
stable ways than in daily life (Spillman, 2012; Swidler, 2003). In sports
collective representations are mediated by the loose logics of the institu-
tionalized play. These logics are loose. The game script is not set in stone.
Our attentiveness should thus be directed at plausible interpretation. New
action-forms steadily emerge as broad and institutional meaning struc-
tures collide. To complicate the matter, within institutions we find groups
that mediate both broad and institutional culture in making group identi-
ties and interactional styles (Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2003). Groups strive
to harmonize freedom in play with game discipline, broad moralities with
institutional goals. These symbolic layers re-fuse and defuse, feed off, and
feedback to create many meanings. A multidimensional approach deals
with how these various levels of mediation intersect.
These layers of meaning also move through bodies and objects. Codes,
narratives and myth guide nonverbal interpretations and our sensory
16 T. B. BROCH
engaging with social and material life. This is an iconic process that inter-
weaves meaning, materiality, and corporal acts. Alexander (2008a, 2008b,
2010, 2011) theorizes the aesthetic experience as iconicity and allows us
to account for how the moral depth of culture structures are expressed
through a sensuous surface. An icon is a compression and an expression of
a whole field of myth and meaning in which it is embedded and allows us
to immerse with the icon through an aesthetic experience (Giesen, 2012;
Smith, 2012; Sonnevend, 2012). Along with performance theory, iconic-
ity lets us explore the nonverbalized and material meanings of the sport
act. Corporal materiality and props are expressive surfaces that resound
deep meaning to selves and others (Champagne, 2018). The iconic con-
sciousness guides corporal acts and a “stellar performance” bolsters the
power of the body and its props. Through performance, this deep inter-
pretive play gives sport objects the meaningful power and possibility to
become a performer itself (Alexander, 2012).
As with the performance, there are also two sides to seeing iconic-
ity. The surface of athletic bodies and game scripts can provide aesthet-
ically pleasing contours and rhythms. These immediate referents become
beautiful, sacred, or profane through sensory engagements with symbol-
structured layers. Pearls of sweat, jukes just avoiding a tackle, the come-
back kid and a slam-dunk are dramatic to actors and onlookers if their
surfaces echo meaningful styles of play and the moral depths of charac-
ter, courage and devotion. This sensory experiencing relies on cognitive
simplifications of culture structures to allow swift readings and pattern
recognition of right and left jukes, of good and bad moralities in sports’
micro-worlds. This iconic power also reaches far beyond the field of play
to generate the athlete icons that can condense meaning systems in cor-
poral form. Of course, expert knowledge of particular sports grants a dif-
ferent appreciation than if you are a novice. Familiarity with the celebrity
allows access to the soap operas linking on-field and off-field dramas. Yet,
broad socio-cultural and narrow sport-cultural capital remains the cues
and clues that alone cannot generate deep play. Culture structures is what
makes decisive games into apocalyptic battles of geopolitical superpowers,
into a romantic appreciation of embodied identities and skills, into comics
of failure, flimsy, and flamboyance (see Smith, 2005). Deep culture is what
generates deep play.
In sports, actors and audiences join in the dramaturgy of putting cul-
ture into action. Distinctions between actors and audiences in sports are
therefore tricky. Professional athletes are aware that they are performing,
but they will not be successful, if they do not immerse in play (Csik-
szentmihalyi, 1975; Gumbrecht, 2006; Sutton-Smith, 1997). At the same
time, sport actors know that their coaches, referees, and audiences are
assessing both the aesthetic surface of their skills and their moral play.
What’s more, teammates and competitors that are looking for the ath-
lete’s dramatic statements and Freudian slips that can reveal how to best
carry on with the action. A successful athlete-performer convinces an
audience ranging from the global crowd to the self. From the spectator’s
point of view, audiences also strive for fusion and defusion, or what Daloz
(2017, p. 137) would term identification and dis-identification with ath-
letes, teams, and other fans. Parents identify with the physical and moral
bravery of their children and, at times, attempt to repair the image of their
unruly kids (and selves). Devoted fans reimmerse in their own biographies
and in the myths and soap operas of children’s and elite sports. Deep
play can thus engross us in many different ways and victory comes in
many shapes. Together, sport actors and audiences anticipate how game
rhythms playfully, morally, and socially intersect—whether the pass and
the receiver will join or not. This is not all about winning the game. It
is about the successful performance and a chance for those present to
experience the cultural mastery of liquefying divisions the structural ele-
ments of performance (Alexander, 2011, p. 55). It is about making the
sport performance ritual-like and allow action and place to transcend from
mundanity to ritual, in an instance, then back (Smith, 1999).
Sport carves out symbolic spaces and use physical spaces, stages, and
arenas for play. These means of symbolic production, the field, equipment
and props serve as material culture that help actors dramatize otherwise
invisible motives and morals. This act requires the skill to maneuver the
game script and, at the same time, engage in the play of mis-en-scèn,
putting culture “into the scene.” There is an obvious need for the mate-
rialization of the symbolic play space as well as for a ball in ball games and
racquets in racquet games. Through the cultural mastery of mis-en-scèn
players can both carve out and enter fields of play. Here, actors put on
formal or informal uniforms, sports tape screech, under-armor attire, face
paint, and padding shapes the act. This iconic feel of spatial and corpo-
ral change, as an arena gives you the chills, as sport-tape reinforces the
body, adorns the play and person made athlete. Sport appeals to its var-
ious actors and audiences by way of this dramatic capacity. Sport allows
us to practice and witness the pragmatic effect of emotion management
and dramaturgy through the practice of mis-en-scèn. A performative feel
18 T. B. BROCH
for the game is made here, at the margins of the game, creative play and
performative structures.
Some sport actors have more social power than others do. Quite often,
sports involve a performance leader, a coach who trains athletes that strat-
ify in relation to skill. Yet, some players exercise more social power than
their coaches do. Some athletes have better access to the stage of composi-
tion, more saying, more playing time than others have, and thus have their
mise-en-scène more easily accepted. The “iconic coach,” “sport stars” and
“talents,” once shaped by broad, institutional and group codes, are often
allowed more mistakes and therefore get more chances to show character
and grit than the actor who has not been seen as such. Both aesthetics and
technical skills are in the cultural eye of the beholder. Performance grant
social power to both. A cultural sociology of sport brings hermeneutic
power to the fore.
By joining performance and iconicity theory, we can break clean with
the romantics of classical play and game theory, challenge the cynicism
of the cultural Marxist tradition but also question the disenchanted anal-
yses of the practice theorist and the Foucaultian. With Foucault (1977),
sport are rationalized institutions aiming for machine-like actors. Analyses
avoid the subjectivity, myth, and virtues that can explain behavior (Reed,
2012). Motivation is sidelined as rational training techniques intend to
generate clockwork selves that reiterate social control (Smith, 2008). The
game modality, perhaps, persuades Foucaultians in seeing sports as styl-
ized forms of interaction, barely creative, even meaningless. Also practice
theory prefers analyses of sports as rid of meaningful and discursive aware-
ness. Bourdieusians show how athletes’ habitualized game-structure fuse
with economic and social conditions to shape an embodied feel for the
game’s practical behavoir and its social functions (Bourdieu, 1990; Wac-
quant, 2004). As with the “hard truths” of macro inequality, the institu-
tionalized play of games has seemingly become a “hard variable” relieving
the Foucaultian and the Bourdieusian from any need to interpret patterns
of meaning. Indeed, skill acquisition is vital but a cultural sociology of
sport must flip the scrip. Performance theory reveals how actors question
and play with social power and that rationality is a discourse and not an
empirical fact (Alexander, 1995).
Social power and game scripts set the stage for plausible meaning-
making but these structures alone cannot generate meaningful sports.
Meaningful sports occur when we strike a balance between being in con-
trol or overwhelmed by the plausible limits of its organized play. At
this time, we can achieve a high-pitched felicity, involvement, or flow,

Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 64) argued. To him, flow is contingent on
the matching of game challenges by individual skills. With performance
theory, the study focuses on how skillful actors meet scripted trials by
meaning-making skills. Flow is this meaning-seeking process and attrac-
tion of its achievement: a sensory experience of cultural mastery. Sport
flows in rhythms. Actors and audiences work in between the ebbs and
tides to shape its dramatic pulse. What is lost is not discursive awareness,
or “the awareness of one’s body or one’s functions, but only the self
construct ” as we gain a feeling of great power (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975,
pp. 43–44). This is a hermeneutic power stemming from play attempts at
omnipotence (Winnicott, 1971/2005) in which culture guides our mas-
tery of social transitions and material realities. Through culture we join
in something “whose fuller meaning eludes” us and “enjoy the possibility
for control despite being unable to access directly the script” (Bartman-
ski & Alexander, 2012, p. 2). The sense of a meaningful self reemerges
stronger after an episode of iconic flow but separation and defusion can
be equally uneasy and, at times, lead us into attempts at repair.
Cultural Marxists, Foucaultians, and practice theorists cannot alone
provide an answer as to why this happens. A cultural sociology of perfor-
mance balances the books by revealing an answer hidden in the symbolic
layering of culture structures, and the objects that condense its meanings.
From institutional, group and individual outlooks, iconic flow allows us
to find a multitude of meanings in the global game plots that makes insti-
tutional play turn into dramas with real contestants. As social life itself,
games and their material surfaces are moved by the subjective meanings
that resound the cultural depths of fleeting cathexis and empathy. In cul-
turally contingent ways, narratives, codes, and myth prevail in the sport
of modernity. Through skill acquisition and in our dealing with inequal-
ities and rationality. In contemporary sports, iconic flow is transient but
remains powerful in shaping bodies, gender, and social action. A perfor-
mative feel for the game stays an incentive for participation on the field,
in the stance and with the sport media.
Methodology
This project leans on the qualitative sociology that shows how “thick
description” can support explanatory claims and theoretical generaliza-
tions.28 These voices draw on Geertz’s essay on the Balinese cockfight
20 T. B. BROCH
to illustrate how theory and rich empirical accounts work together in

the form of an abductive analysis. Tavory and Timmermans (2014, p. 8)
define this approach as neither that of the grounded scholar insisting on
building theory off explicit salience and a dutiful coding of mountains of
data. Nor of the devoted student that vows to theoretical truths about
meaning and power, and that is mildly annoyed by waiting for the “right
quote.”
As a contrasting case to the majority of sport and gender research, Nor-
wegian handball is empirically distant, yet a theoretically close analogy to
the power and performance sports often explored in international sociol-
ogy. As such, handball possibly permits a different take on the claims that
capitalist interests and patriarchy always outweigh other cultural forces in
celebrating violent male role models and downplaying the achievements
of women athletes.29 From 2007 to 2017 I collected data from newspa-
pers and televised Norwegian handball. TV commentary from two inter-
national men championships, in 2007 and 2008, and one women champi-
onship in 2009, eighteen men’s and eight women’s games in total, serve
as the analytic nucleus of part I of the book. Knowing with Smith (2005)
that narrative genre tells and enacts the same story in diverse ways, recur-
rent themes of chance, fears, hopes and struggle inspired a curiosity about
the sport quest as genre. It could explain fluxes of romantic, apocalyptic,
and logic shaping of game experiences, and make narrative, in and of
itself, a tool to illustrate how the sport quests of modernity, just like the
myths of premodern times, remain deeply riddled with meaning. Thick
description (Geertz, 1973c) and structural hermeneutics (Alexander &
Smith, 2003) could then advance a binary code thought to shape inter-
pretations of handball’s game script. By giving handball a culture struc-
ture of its own, ideas about sport as best seen in light of external forces
like patriarchy and capitalism, could be challenged. The code that cut
across the gendered division of play could reveal empirical evidence of
gender sameness and differences. With a comparative tactic, I moved on
to study discrepancies between Norwegian gendered handball and gen-
dered sports documented elsewhere. This teased out what seemed to be
Norwegian about the journalists’ depictions of the global game script. An
ethnographic proclivity enabled the two levels of analysis that of genre and
that of the institutional code, to jointly reveal how the quest gives force to
the idealized handballer in the making of the iconic athlete. Sports pro-
vide global stages to display a local belonging and pride (Jijon, 2013,
2015) that re-fuse national and gendered narratives to shape folkloric
readings and distinct styles of game play (Archetti, 2003). Part I of the
book explores how sport belonging, aesthetics and myth fuse with the
solidarities and boundaries shaping gender in Norway. Handball game-
commentary, democratic narratives, and mythmaking defied the univer-
salism of prior work.
The book moves on to an ethnography paying attention to how the
handball code, gender narratives, and myth in media and pop-culture is
made relevant by situated actors. Part II bridges symbolic interactionism’s
attention to detail and a cultural sociology exploring how fantasy and
broad culture flows between elite sport media and youth sport practices.
During 2011–2012, I carried out participant field observations in one
team of 15 years-old boys and in one of 13 years-old girls. For about
eight months, I joined training sessions, team meetings, and matches. As
a handball player myself, I offered to join and help the coaches in training
the youth. In so doing, the team was observed from the stance, from the
bench, and from the field as I joined coaches and actors in play. With
its loose logics, the handball code mapped out in the media analyses was
also prominent at the youth sport arena. At the arena, coded talk and
action often linked girls and boys to the stories and characters produced
by media. The next move was to look for the ways that youth sport actors
fused meanings about sports with meaning-making in sports. With aims
for felicity and flow, socialization into a performative feel for the game
fused drills and tactics with moralities and myth about democratic sports.
While sport sociology ethnographies of Theberge (2000) and Mess-
ner (2002, 2009) provide rich backdrops of gender conflict, interaction-
ist studies tend to idealize inductive theorizing of belonging and mas-
tery. Fine’s (1987, 2015) micro finessing shows how task orientation and
moral communities create sport communities. Beauchez (2016, 2018b)
reveals how biographies and social injustice are shaped through boxing as
a source of addictive escape and newfound recognition. DeLand (2012,
2018) shows how pickup basketballers generate recurrent scenes of per-
formance with narrative starts, disorder, and conclusions. My abductive
tactic tries to clear these deductive and the inductive streams with a bridge
that likely falls short of pleasing all. Critical deduction of competition
would equal its task orientation to hierarchy and its moral communities
to patriarchal gender power. An inductive view would try to build theories
of task orientation and argue that cultures and characters emerge from the
interaction. Neither tactic is adequate when studying how meaning flows
in feedback loops between the symbolic layers of macro, institutional and
22 T. B. BROCH
group cultures.30 Sports allow children and adults to dream about and
play with our ideas of a good life, of power relations and solidarity (S.
Anderson, 2008; Dyck, 2012; Messner, 2002, 2009). The idea of a per-
formative feel for the game inspires analyses of how the sport team is a
scene for fights about how idealized gender relations can and should enter
competition. In the girls’ team, a phenomenology of the throw shows
how the children of the ’68 generation are trained to outdate the fusion
of “throwing like a girl” with notions of female inabilities and to make the
iconic smile of the elite handballgirl a tactical asset in their sport war. In
the boy’s team, discourses about rationality and social power are as promi-
nent as transcendental aims of belonging and attraction when the coach
and athletes give meaning to the hierarchies of sport bodies in the media
and at the arena. The code of play and seriousness shows that a perfor-
mative feel for the game involves an attentive code-switching as children
and adults embrace the ambivalence of meaningful sports.
To answer the question, “how does the meaning of sports intersect
with gender,” we need theoretical knowledge about how sports shape
meaning and about gender as a socio-cultural construct. We also need
these theories to be emptied out in a manner that makes way for using
thick empirical information to explain how observed meaning shapes
action. Then, and if our anthropologic belief that meaning of gender and
sport actually do vary culturally, our answer to this question will create
a colorful and critical field of study. It might entice us to rethink our
truths about play, children and adults, about sport, gender, and power.
Cultural sociology helps us see how meaningful sports bring landscapes
of myth and narratives into play—how the sport/media-nexus and sport-
institutional practices pertain to a whole way of life.31 Elite and youth
sports are no different in this regard. Looking at how sports are made
meaningful, gender becomes only one of the many codes and narratives
that shape social and material life. We are forced to account for the sym-
bolic layers that shape gendered life.
Outline of the Book

In Norway, the gender and national identity nexus is twisted in a way that
reveals the limits to a cultural Marxist analysis. Gullestad (1991, 2001)
defined the specificities of a Scandinavian version of egalitarian individu-
alism that is helpful in this regard. Influenced by Lutheran Protestantism,
this form of individualism fused notions of independence (selvstendighet,
uavhengighet ) with the strong collective values of the welfare state. Con-
trasting US notions of equality that signify equal opportunity to become
different. Norwegian views of equality, or sameness (likhet ), tend to indi-
cate being and doing the same and the chance for similar results. “In
the Norwegian context, differences between people are easily perceived as
unwanted hierarchy and as injustice” (Gullestad, 1991, p. 4). This code
of sameness generates an evaluative code shaping a society in which narra-
tives and myth of modesty and sameness are highly valued (Daloz, 2007;
Larsen, 2016; Skarpenes, 2007). Of course, it is not as if there are no
macro-social and gender inequalities in Norway. Norwegians still tend
to choose “traditionally gendered” occupations and many of the most
demanding and least-rewarded jobs are still done by women (Holst, 2009;
Vike, 2001). The code alerts us to how these social inequalities are medi-
ated by civil solidarity and actors shaping of a never fully obtainable, yet
shared democratic project (Alexander, 2006) in which gender equality is
at its core. Sameness provides substantial analytic potentials by exposing
a peculiar Scandinavian civil sphere and the paradoxes this culture gen-
erates across multiple institutional realms (Lien, Lidén, & Vike, 2001).
In sports, frictions between inclusive ideals and the hierarchal logic of
competition create extensive dilemmas for those involved (Broch, 2016;
Henningsen, 2001).
While the gender gap in sport has narrowed globally, it has almost van-
ished in Norway (Green, 2018). In Norway, 93% of the nation’s youth
have spent time doing organized sports. It is not only statistically nor-
mal for Norwegian-ethnic majority girls and boys to try out, join, and for
some time participate in organized sports. It is normative. To the point
in which parents are concerned that their children might be isolated if
they do not join (Johansen & Green, 2017). The Norwegian women
handballer is, to some, an affirmation of this narrow gender gap and a
material proof of the gains of gender sameness. In 2013, the year I ended
my fieldwork, the handball federation was the fourth largest of about 55
specialized sport federations in Norway. With 114285 memberships, two-
thirds of them being girls and women, it was about one-third the size of
the country’s largest federation, a soccer federation dominated by two-
thirds boys and men. From the inauguration of the federation in 1937,
the women have outshined and outnumbered their men peers. But also
the media have preferred the women’s performances over the men, von
der Lippe (1997) argues. In 1997, the male coach of top-ranked Bække-
laget, stated that his Danish import player, Anja Andersen, was not only
24 T. B. BROCH
the world’s best female handballer. There was no man in the world who
shoot better or with more versatility, he argued (von der Lippe, 2001).
From a 1986 World Cup bronze to the end of the 2012 Olympic sum-
mer, the women team was reigning Olympic, World and European cham-
pions. While the gendered conception of this game of controlled aggres-
sion has been seen as a typical men’s sport in France and Germany, swayed
between the genders in Sweden and Denmark, it has for long remained a
women’s game in Norway.32 The handballgirl as an icon of women power
has long been present in the media and at the sport arenas of Norway.
Part I of the book studies how this sporting drama of gender and social
equality, of Norwegian handball, resounds with existential and moral
dilemmas. The analysis begins a venture into the enchanted and meaning-
ful landscapes of media sports and explores the journalistic performances
as a re-fusion of broad culture to the scripted sport quest. This spring-
board allows us to single out how media sports provides a live game
mythmaking in modernity and the possibility of iconic flow this might
entail for the sport audience. The analysis ends with a comparative anal-
ogy of the Einherjer, a Viking warrior from Norse mythology, and current
sport media depictions. Leveraging cultural-historical knowledge like this
is not foremost to the benefit of empirical conclusions but of theoretical
evidence. It reveals a deep meaning structuring of competition that tran-
scends time. As part of a social psychoanalysis, it develops ideas of recur-
ring culture structures in Norwegian sport contexts and makes enchant-
ment the achieved fusion of national culture, observed action, and myth
making about chance, fears, hopes, and struggle.
The remainder of media analyses is dedicated to exploring how women
and men athletes, the handballgirls, and the handballboys, their corporal
materiality and actions are assessed by journalists. I map a culture struc-
ture that cuts across the sex binary that separate men and women ath-
letes into their dichotomous categories of play. The social organization of
handball, its rules and regulations are about equal for both. The interpre-
tive code, the binary that the journalists use to understand handball-girls
and boys is also the same. Both women and men, their performances on
the court, are evaluated by the purification of toughness and polluting
of kindness. When this institutional code intersects with bodies, it shapes
handball in subtly varied but gendered ways. The visual corporality of
athletes evoke readings of how chance, fears, hopes, and struggle intersect
with gender in Norway. Myth and sound imitations condense understand-
ings of handball for audiences’ to reinterpret by sensory reading of and
psychological identification with the bodily actions and gendered meaning

encircling the play.
Part II enters into the youth sports arena to explore links between
the sport media’s disseminated meanings and group interaction. I also
look into the meaning-making process generating Norwegian handball
and the iconic handballgirl . We have to backtrack, look into how hand-
ball is learned and how girls in their early teens are socialized into hand-
ballgirls. From the vantage point of their coaches, this femininity is best
directed by re-fusing broad culture and elite sports to reveal how the
game should be experienced and how the young women should sum-
mon the full force of their muscularity. The ability to play with moralities
and passions are key to the performative act in which broad and institu-
tional meaning systems are attempted somaticized through dramaturgy.
The most important requisite to becoming a handballgirl is to be tough—
to perform the code and its system of feeling rules—and to find it felici-
tous. Also at the youth sport arena, in order to win handball matches, it
is important to be unafraid, strong and cooperative. Putting up a smile
in hardship becomes a performative of perseverance in solidary struggles.
It signifies the believed to be fundamental “joy of sport,” an important
aspect of how these Norwegians interpret the game-script’s feeling rules.
No one, the coaches believed, exemplifies the fusion of toughness and joy
in a better way than the iconic handballgirl that circulates in the media
and in their broad egalitarian culture.
The final empirical chapter studies the young handball-man trying
to become a Norwegian handballboy. The iconic handballgirl is ever-
present, as its media image enters the arena, as the young men meet
women peers, and as their mothers, stacked with sport capital, tries to
guide their sons’ play and moralities. But also a global-cultural icon, from
Hollywood, was to assist this team. The 15 years-olds had gotten far in
embodying the game. Yet, the Hollywood movie revealed how bodies,
action, and social life kept on being shaped by and shaping narratives and
myth that primed the athletes for action. Aiming to foresee and control
the uncertainty of outcome, enchantment, even magic, was used to align
culture with the game’s scripted pragmatics. The coach wanted his players
to feel the power of solidarity in competition but it was not for all. Yet,
discrepancies in interpretation did not always dissolve chances of iconic
flow. On the contrary, cultural mastery allowed individual paths in sol-
idary attempts to generate and sustain a multitude of commitments to
the hierarchal democracy. Much of sports’ cultural force and attraction
26 T. B. BROCH
resides within this capacity for parallel flows. The coach was left with a
melting pot of democratic ambition, combative aggression, and wishes
for a sustained team that could escape from the economic and material
obsessions that surrounded their play.
Throughout I question our binaries of fiction vs. reality, tradition vs.
modernity, magic vs. pragmatics, childhood vs. adulthood, and equal-
ity vs. competition. In fact, sports are great for understanding how fic-
tion and media blend into real life. How modernity is still riddled with
magic. How transitions from childhood to adulthood takes the form of
hermeneutic loops. How combat can be civil. For this reason, the social
life of sports cannot be plausibly retold only through the lens of inequal-
ity categories. It is too complex. This does not mean that inequality, or
in this book that gender is irrelevant. It means that gender is as dynamic
as our axiomatic truths hold. That as real bodies take the field, gendered
dreams of toughness and equality shape the act. In sports, these perfor-
mances are guided by a creative play with our collective culture, with
the very categories sociologist love to see the world through. Inside the
game’s scripted realities, we are pushed and pulled between the irrecon-
cilable poles of these categories. Adults keep going back to childhood for
interpretive resources and children endeavor for imagined adult realities.
At times, gender matters. Not all the time, and not always with the effect
of reducing us all to reifications of social inequality or confusing us with
patriarchal ambiguity. Sport meanings and actions, as bodies and game
rhythms, are directed by multiple patterns and landscapes of meaning.
That is what this book is about.
Notes
1. Reed (2011, p. 86) explores the interpretive limits of critical and norma-
tive social sciences. After the cultural turn, gender studies can exemplify
his claims of how narrative, myth, and performance have become among
our favorite tools to make critical and normative sense of culture.
2. See Philip Smith and Jeffrey Alexander (2005) about “The New
Durkheim.”
3. While Durkheim is central to the strong program in cultural sociology, he
failed to theorize the conditions for symbolic action in complex societies
(Alexander, 2004).
4. Caillois (1958/1979), Geertz (1973a), Goffman (1961), and Huizinga

(1938/1950).
5. Geertz (1973b, p. 207) held that ideology critiques reduce social life
to structures of stratification, the “effect they presumably mirror,” or
“the social reality they presumably distort.” More recently, Alexander and
Smith (2003) separates a sociology of culture from a cultural sociology. The
former is concerned with culture as a soft variable explained by social
and material “realities.” The latter is concerned with culture as a strong
variable that can explain how meaning shapes social life. Latour (2005,
p. 8) argues that critical theorists have “confused what they are trying
to explain with the explanation.” Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), hold
that critical sociology emphasizes the academic’s critique rather than the
actors’ uttered and practiced critiques.
6. The common principle of intersectional theory is that various sociological
categories, like gender, race, and class, not only separately but also jointly,
produces inequalities (Choo & Ferree, 2010; Crenshaw, 1989).
7. Nielsen (2014, p. 28, my translation) drawing on Beauvoir (1999) and
Hirdman (1998).
8. West and Zimmerman (1987, p. 126) held that “the doing” of gender is
undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society
is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially
guided perceptual, interactional, and micro-political activities that cast par-
ticular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine “natures.” They
drew on Connell (1985) to explicate how micro-gender is shored up in
macro-social and structured power relations.
9. Gender theorizing “requires a theory of social structure,” Connell told us
in 1987 (p. 91) and again in (2002).
10. West and Fenstermaker (1995) reworked “doing gender” into a study of
“doing difference.” Today, West and Zimmerman (2009) argue that the
concepts are commonplace, to the point in which scholars like Butler’s
(2004) never cites their work. The concept still holds a prominent posi-
tion in holding individuals’ accountable for undoing and redoing of patri-
archy (Connell, 2009; Messerschmidt, 2009) and in showing how situated
interaction is linked to diversified structural inequalities (Jones, 2009).
Connell’s (1987, 2005) used Gramsci’s hegemony theory to conceptu-
alize “hegemonic masculinity.” Critiqued for an exaggerated emphasis on
social structure, Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) reworked the theory
to encompass interrelations between hegemonic, subordinated, complicit
and marginalized, local and global men. Still keeping a focus on revealing
a global patriarchy (Messerschmidt, 2009, 2012).
11. Hall (1999, p. 186) notes that there is no sense of a voluntarist subject in
Butler’s (1998, 2004) notion of performativity, “as actors are little more
than ventriloquists, iterating the gendered acts that have become before
28 T. B. BROCH
them.” Butler’s actors either reproduce or bend empirical and theoretical

gender norms.
12. Carrington (2010, pp. 11–12) points to Connell (1987, 2000), Kimmel
(2008), and Messner’s (1992) work.
13. The literature is extensive (Follo, 2012; Grindstaff & West, 2011; Hov-
den, 2010; Hovden & Rafoss, 2017; Messner, 2002; Musto, Cooky, &
Messner, 2017; Sisjord & Kristiansen, 2009; Spaaij, Farquharson, & Mar-
joribanks, 2015). See for example Bruce (2013) for an introduction.
14. Disciplinary leaders note that sport sociology since the late 1970s and
early 1980s have been led by neo-Marxist, feminist, and Marxist-feminist
scholars who opted for a critical use of research to “purify” the “patho-
logical” sport-forms under capitalism (Coakley & Dunning, 2002) and
patriarchy (Theberge, 2002).
15. Reproduction (Gee, 2009; Messner & Sabo, 1994) and challenges (E.
Anderson, 2008; Coad, 2008).
16. Bäckström (2013), Cooky (2006), and Messner (2013).
17. Daniels (2009) and Davis-Delano, Pollock, and Vose (2009).
18. Markula (2003) presents a Foucaultian analysis and Thorpe using (2008,
2009, 2010) both Bourdieu and Foucault to provide slightly varied, yet
critical angels on gendered inequality in sport life.
19. Norwegian gender and sport researchers argue that central values and
norms in society correspond with central values and norms in sport to
normalizes “masculinity” as superior and “femininity” as inferior (Fasting,
1998, 2011; Fasting, Pfister, & Scraton, 2004). This is so through the
Bourdieusian concept of doxa (Sisjord, 2009; von der Lippe, 1997), the
Connellist concept of hegemony (Sisjord & Kristiansen, 2008, 2009; von
der Lippe, 2010), and Foucaultian ideas of discourse (Hjelseth & Hovden,
2014; Hovden, 2010).
20. Bernstein and Kian (2013, p. 324) and Markula (2009, p. 12).
21. Borcila (2000), Bruce (2009), and Koh (2009).
22. Sport sociology, they say, is “a field of scholarship that has paid consider-
able attention to the ways in which sport has been applied instrumentally
in order to advance or shore up state, class and gender interests” (Dyck
& Archetti, 2003, p. 13; See also Dyck, 2000, 2012; MacAloon, 1992,
pp. 106–107).
23. Meier (1988) and Suits (1988).
24. Mead (1934/2015) and Winnicott (1971/2005, p. 64).
25. I borrow the concept of strategies of action from Swidler (1986), but
instead of insisting that micro and institutional settings exercise monopoly
over causality, I rely on her later moves toward semiotics and notes on
how institutional codes (Swidler, 2003) and broad cultural semiotic axes
(Tavory & Swidler, 2009) shape social action.
26. Goffman (1961, p. 78) draws on Erikson (1937) to show how psychoso-
cial worlds are shaped in interaction.
27. In theorizing the meaning of social structures, Spillman (2002a) and
Alexander (2004, 2011) draw on Austin’s (1957) and Goffman’s (1959,
1983) use of the concept of felicity. Social structures are successfully
brought to bear on purposeful meaning making, not because of its truth-
value, but as actors strive to be content with how interaction shapes social
categories and relations.
28. Reed (2011), Small (2009), and Spillman (2014).
29. Knoppers and Anthonissen (2003), Markula (2009), Messner, Dunbar,
and Hunt (2000), Musto et al. (2017), Scraton, Fasting, Pfister, and
Bunuel (1999), Wenner (2004), and Wensing and Bruce (2003).
30. Smith (2017) draws on Jack Katz (2016) who theorize how macro and
micro culture, or meanings about a culture and within a culture, are
linked. “Feedback loops” between meaningful micro actions and macro
culture, they argue, shape actions and representation, motivation and
opportunity.
31. Spillman (2002b, p. 26) argues that cultural sociology bridges the gap
between an anthropological study of culture as a “whole way of life” with
a sociological concern for culture as production outcomes and the sym-
bols, meanings, and values in particular social locations and the specialized
institutions that organize our social life.
32. As a stark contrast to the North American games of baseball and foot-
ball that are (almost) exclusively for men, it is difficult to make assertive
claims about the gendered conception of many other sports as they seem
to fluctuate historically due to visibility and merits. It is nonetheless inter-
esting that handball, with its glaring physical aspects, has for long come
to be defined as a women’s game in Norway. That it seems to fluctuate
between the genders, or to be seen as gender neutral in Sweden and Den-
mark. That the game is considered as a more typical men’s game in France
and Germany where men have historically outnumbered women athletes
(Goksøyr, 2008; Grahn, 2008, p. 100; von der Lippe, 1997, 2002).
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PART I
Media, Sport Enchantment and Gender

CHAPTER 2
Media and Sport Enchantment: Narrative,

Myth, and Games of Modernity
Sport attraction, or in the wording of Romans “bread and circus,” can be

seen as a veil of appeasement, distorting the public’s reflective awareness
and upholding the power status quo. Similarly, sport in modernity, the
critical theorist holds, generates polluted nationalism, dirty sport idols
for youth, male sport heroes destroying their bodies and women hav-
ing their athletic feats mocked and masked.1 This cultural Marxist lens
lets us clearly see how sport media are polluted by capitalism, its rituals
of destruction are revealed as patriarchal, and its fusion as a cocktail of
inequality. The evidence is overwhelming. It matches our gut feeling as
we witness how college sports are commodified, how sport heroes earn
god-like salaries and how our local team is composed of a global roster.
These crushing proofs can easily relieve us from trying to account for the
sustained interest in sports. What is its enchantment? Where does it come
from? Does sport attraction have any promises for solidarity? A study of
meaningful media sports asks these questions. It shows that it is not only
the cultural Marxist that uses sport to reflect on society and to ask and
answer moral questions. Also actors, audiences, journalists, and politicians
use sport to relect on social life. When in meaningful contact with sports,
we all do it. I turn to elucidate how the journalist uses sport to reflect on
existential questions. What answer can she possibly find? How is the insti-
tutionalized play of handball read by “the journalist as hermenutician.”
Looking into what is said, the surface of discourse, is just the beginning.
We need to dig into the deep structures that make game play a means for

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_2
44 T. B. BROCH
social analysis. This move lets us shed light on how the journalist’s per-
formance fuse institutional play with broadly available culture and allow
a re-fusion of sports pragmatics with social life. This is where I begin
studying how meaningful sports intersect with gender.
This One’s for the Record Books: Game

Dynamics and Storytelling
Telling stories about sports, like any other cultural phenomenon, entails
the act of narration. This holds true for live game commentary, as well as
the stories leading up to an event and the tales we tell after the contest has
finished (Næss, 2014). In sport stories, athletes endure a regular season
and, if they make it, post-season qualification and a final contest. Every
season, the athlete, or the team, sets forth on a quest. The unfolding of
the quest structure will provide them with opponents, complications, and
a climax before the season is resolved and normalcy is renewed. Champi-
ons are crowned, the playing field is “evened out.” A new season-story can
begin.2 Within the seasonal cycle of sports, there is always a next season
and tournament, just around the bend with new chances for success and
failure. Indeed, most of us are well aware that ideas of a “levelled playing
field,” free from doping, commercial, corporate, and national interests,
are faulty—yet the sport narrative invites us to participate, get emotionally
involved, and narrow our focus on the storied flow of events. Nothing,
perhaps, is more dramatic than when the pure hero defeats an opposition
that can be journalistically tainted by discoveries of systematic doping or
economic favoritism.
The narrative progression of events allows journalists to depict sports
in a soap-opera-like fashion in which players, coaches, referees, and audi-
ences are cast as rivals, duelists, heroes, and villains (Goksøyr & Olstad,
2002; Rowe, 2004). Different genres and societal events moreover color
this commentary in historically and culturally diverse ways. The first
Olympic athletes in Greece performed naked under the eyes of their gods
and those present in the arena. Today’s Olympic athletes perform half-
naked under the inspection of a global crowd and the commercial gods
looking to sustain old and create new market options (Goldman & Pap-
son, 1998). Yet the soap opera of sports have a realist twist. With “real”
individuals in unpredictable contest sports are to be found somewhere
between a soap and a social drama. The dramaturgy of the naked and
2 MEDIA AND SPORT ENCHANTMENT: NARRATIVE, MYTH … 45
pure athletic performance, an act for all to see, its inescapable narrative
reality for the athlete, is contingent on the journalistic performance.
All the color commentary presented in this first part of the book, both
on women and men handball, is made by the same two men journalists
of Norwegian TV2. Their voices have come to define the sound of Nor-
wegian handball for the very long time the broadcaster had an almost
exclusive right to show handball. Liked and disliked for their prepared
spontaneity, the two have been compared to Statler and Waldorf of the
Muppet show as they from their booth in the balcony have colored and
commented handball. Sort of like national treasures, along with the ath-
letes, they have been an influential part of the myth making about the
game. In 2009, as Norway faces off against Romania in the women’s
world championship in China, the commentators not only tell but create
the quest and the very team of women athletes:
We’re back in the World Cup arena in Suzhou. The stage is set [duket ] for
an epic battle [storkamp] between two of the gold-medal favorites in this
tournament… The Romanian team has kept its roster for some time now.
Compared to last year’s European Championships they have also acquired
linesplayer Stanca and right-winger Varzaru. I think Romania thus far has
looked better then Norway. It is, in fact, the first time I am sitting here
[in the commentators booth] with a fear of losing an important game. We
are evenly matched…
[The national anthems are played]
Both teams won their four preliminary games and are guaranteed a spot in
the intermediate playoff. This game settles how the teams are ceded when
going into the playoffs. The winner of this game is almost ready for the
semifinal, unless they stumble in the silk threads here in the silk town of
Suzhou.
The game’s plot structure guides the unpredictable story that is about
to play out. Part of its aesthetics and attraction reside within its possi-
bilities of sudden narrative shifts. Stray but a little and your team might
stumble in the silky beauty of it all. Sport narratives, in this sense, have
an unpredictable outcome situated within a highly predictable narrative
structure of the quest. What is required by the sport journalist then, is
nothing less than weaving background representations and the pragmatic
setting into an “epic battle,” to color the game with the genre of hero-
ics. As Norway is about to play Romania, the commentators set the stage
[duket, in English clothed]; like at a fine dinner table inviting the festive
46 T. B. BROCH
evening. The game’s cast of athletes, its prequels and possible sequels, are
presented in the opening credits along with a thick dramaturgy. National
flags wave from the ceiling and are stitched to the jersey-heart. National
anthems join athletes, coaches, and enthused spectators in belonging and
anticipation. The sport theatre can put on a play of fears and hopes for
national sporting success.
Rowe (2004, p. 118) holds that a sport commentators’ job is to
enhance spectators’ viewing through poetic imagery and game analysis.
The very team of commentators calling Norwegian handball is composed
by one journalist and one former national team player. Still, separating
poetics from pragmatics can produce false dichotomies. Sport narratives
are thrusted by fairly stable deep-discursive codes that join the “objective”
aspects of game analysis and the material bodies of athletes in a poetic
surface. Athletes’ game act is polluted and purified in light of structured
imaginaries of sporting beauty. In between soap and social drama, ath-
letes can even transcend some of our categories to become anomalies of
great power, superstars.3 Achievement and failure are at the core of this
athletic coronation. Yet the meaningful hero and her adversary are only
so if their silhouettes can be used to reflect on social life—if their cor-
poral figures have been shaped and keep being shaped by the cultural
and aesthetic codes that allow interpretation.4 The switch point between
collective codes, the narrative quest structure of games, and the corpo-
ral pieces to its play, thus hold key insights. Anticipation is generated as
codes re-fuse with the life and death of the tournament life cycle and
as the meaningful athlete makes her next move. Surely, not all games
are equally important. But, a good journalistic performance can modestly
invite audiences, skeptics, and enthusiasts alike, in ambivalent maneuver-
ing of meaningful sports:
A: It is all about making it to the playoffs. To paraphrase the leg-

endary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly, this is not a matter of life
and death, it is much, much more important than that. It is not as
important [as life and death], but it is important right now.
The Liverpool soccer coach [1959–1974] Bill Shankly, allows the Nor-
wegian sport journalist and color commentator (A) to maneuver what
is the universal ambivalence of sports’ significance. The quote clarifies a
structural prerequisite of iconic flow. Experienced importance depends
on our focus narrowing in on the act. The mantra of Marit Breivik, who
made the Norwegian handballgirls an institution, “living in the present,”

is yet another example. We are being asked to sharpen our focus on the
task at hand. This is only needed due to the narrative reality of a game
and the social realities that border the act. The game’s almost inescapable
preceding and possible progression. The intersecting of individual and
social worlds. Far from a consensual matter, yet culturally contingent on
felicity, game importance is highly differentiated. On the field, a rookie
might have to prove himself in what is an unimportant game to the vet-
eran. She has to “live in the present game,” and not let focus stray to
the game’s significance for her sport biography. Viewing sports from the
stance, a retired athlete might reexperience anticipation. An aspiring ath-
lete might look for instruction. Others immediately turn away from and
despise the notion that grown men and women’s play can achieve any sort
of importance. Yet, what can just as easily be regarded as “childish play,”
or polluted as a commercial ploy, may all the same allow a break from
mundane chores. For those who continue watching, it is quite possible
that the game’s anticipated significance will shape their experience. This
game is going into the record books whether you like it or not:
A: History is written in Stavanger Sport Arena tonight. Not exactly

like Snorre did back in the olden days [hine hårde], but in those
books that are a little bit smaller, with slightly smaller covers – the
story books of handball.
While Shankly represents a pop-cultural icon, Snorre is the Icelandic

Viking chieftain, historian and poet who wrote the Norwegian king sagas
[Hiemskringla] and the Snorre-Edda containing the poetics of Norse
mythology. The trials and tribulations of the Norse kings and gods,
recorded by Snorre in the 1220s, are often considered two of Norway’s
most important culture-historic volumes.5 Using these “shared memo-
ries” is not simply a means to reinvent traditions for the use in new con-
texts, it is a performative action allowing the audiences to experience the
drama in a deeper and more broadened way (Alexander, 2011, p. 77).
The journalist fuses collective culture onto the sport theatre not only to
make the game dramatic, but to reveal its potential for iconic sensations.
In a quite gentle and wiggly manner, they proscribe as much significance
to the game play as they believe is acceptable for the spectators felicitous
experiencing. Their reinvention of tradition invites us to play along, to
48 T. B. BROCH
join in the performative experiencing of sport. Making history is a pro-

foundly agentic practice (Hilmar, 2016), for journalists and athletes alike.
Undeniably, the significance of the “sporting triangle” in which sport,
the media, and commercial interests pursue economic gains, have come
to shape the mythmaking processes in media sports (Boyle & Haynes,
2000; Helland & Ytre-Arne, 2007). Critical theorists thus often argue
that journalists are dopes chasing viewer ratings to the detriment of
intellectual content and the athletes’ health (Bourdieu, 1998; Messner,
Dunbar, & Hunt, 2000). Yet, these commercial forces are recognized
and maneuvered in meaningful ways by journalists and audiences alike. In
the instance of the Norwegian men’s handball team battling for a play-
off spot, the journalists knew that a victory would prolong their cham-
pionship participation, the media coverage and commercial interests in
the team. Given the weak position of men handball in Norway, at that
time, they were also hoping that elite sport triumphs would generate
increase in youth sport recruitment due to an increase in all the other
“positive commercial” factors of sustained media narration. Perhaps no
wonder, the journalists who also cover women handball had “witnessed”
firsthand how international success shapes the sustained domination of
and national interest in women handball in Norway. These commercial
realities, pounding on borders of play, was therefore a meaningful part of
the story, for both the color commentator and the insider specialist (B)
with embodied knowledge of the game:
A: This is, perhaps, the most important – it is the most important

game in the history of Norwegian men handball.
B: Without question – it is the most important game in the history
of Norwegian men handball.
A: You know, if we win this one, we are off to play for a medal
in Lillehammer on Saturday and Sunday. If we lose, we fall of the
ride, again. If we win, then comes the attention, the sponsorship,
the recruiting [of interested children and youth].
A: This [winning key matches] is how to create a culture of suc-
cess: By repeating the feat from last year’s European Championship.
Then, perhaps, we will see the making of a new fairytale, just like
the one we have experienced with the women’s team for more than
30 years passing.
It is not simply adult child’s play or commercial mythmaking, a hand-

ball game can be, in more than one way, both symbolically and mate-
rially, a matter of life and death. The excitement this possibly entails,
meaning-making about these matters, resides in the enchanted middle-
ground between the cold facts of achievement and subjective evaluation
of morality. Between resources and dedication, purity and pollution. Pro-
longed exposure to this space of enchantment is thought to generate eco-
nomic resources to the medias, the market, the sport, even the athlete is
rewarded with performance bonuses. These are all small parts in the game
quest of a sporting modernity. Here, market relations become a narrative
resource for the journalist in anticipating the outlook of a game. If sports
are arenas for analysis, meaningful sports cannot be fully explained by
these exogenous forces alone. Indeed, social realities do inform our read-
ing of games’ importance. But games “live their own life,” the reporters
tell us. In a series of combative actions and reactions the players work
toward the shared goal of game completion (Elias, 1970; Fine, 2015).
But the road traveled is never identical. The ways aesthetic pragmatics
shape the social life of the game and its afterlife, can make sporting life
meaningful and not mechanic. The victorious lives on in the tournament,
at times, in the history books. In the present interpretation, players and
fans can embark on an epic fairytale.
A: Crystal clear instructions from the Norwegian head coach. If your

going to be on the field, you have to put in the work. The only one
that is allowed to rest is his majesty King Harald who is behold-
ing this fantastic drama in Drammen Arena. For King and country,
literally, the last twelve and a half minutes of the game.
The Norwegian king and his family are well-known sport enthusiasts.
As a matter of fact, King Harald is a self-proclaimed “sport idiot,” and fre-
quently referred to as the people’s king due to his modest appearance.6 His
family is often seen at sport venues, to watch, greet, and cheer. Although
encouraging sport competitions, the royal family does not signify elitism
or militarism in the ways we often see in other countries. Sports and the
Royal family re-fuse in celebration of an active youthhood doing a healthy,
spirited competition. The Norwegian family crowd takes the form of the
Royal family cheering its most energetic youth.7 There are no fighter-
plane flyovers at opening games in Norway or military veteran remem-
brance days at the arena. Still, the quest genre that can easily be fused with
50 T. B. BROCH
the conspicuously militarized culture of the USA and all its pop-cultural
icons, can just as well conflate with Norwegian culture. Nonaction-packed
as it might seem to the outsider, the Norwegian narrative still holds the
aesthetic force to condense and elaborate sport in meaningful ways and
be telling of game pragmatic. A team of youth, their existence and our
future, stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little in the silk threads
of Suzhou and it will fail to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains in the fairy-
tales of our country—if the team is true to the purity and courage of
our kings.8 When the journalist invites us into the game adventure, he
demands the athletes to:
A: Sacrifice your lives!

A: Ye(eeee)s! She is back again! She has plowed her way through
[the defense] twice this game and scored two important goals.
B: She is a player we can trust when the game draws to a close. She is
tough one-on-one, Dyhre Breivang. Follows thru. Shakes off Manea
[the opponent] and just stampedes through the defense!
A: It is her 192nd game on the national team – one of our true
veterans.
B: May it be another 192 to go.
A: Just lays it all on line, sacrifices everything, even her read ponytail.
Breivang, as she entered the national team a rookie, with brute force,
a fearless mindset, and yes, a read ponytail, earned her the nick-
name “Pippi.” The Astrid Lindgren (1948/2015a, 1948/2015b) char-
acter, well-known across Scandinavia, “Pippi Longstocking” is the world
strongest. She has freckles and red pigtails. Can lift her own horse and
fights pirates too. Unafraid, Pippi ignores conventions and adult authority.
Breivang, carried Pippi’s superpowers onto the court. Laid her childhood
on the line, even her red ponytail. It is not, of course, simply conventions
and adult authority these Pippis question. They echo a child’s meaning-
seeking, inclination for, and will to pursue fantasies of power (Winnicott,
1971/2005). Breivang outgrows Pippi, harnessed her power, even if the
ponytail was sacrificed.
Entering Enchantment: Sensing

the Mythmaking Vortex
Swedish historian and media scholar Peter Dahlén (2008, p. 24) argues
that while the Vikings had Norse mythology and medieval times had
Christianity, moderns use sport as part of a pop-cultural mythology. At
the sport theatre, actors perform myth and set the stage for social psycho-
analysis. Regardless of disagreements, in our shared and sensuous inter-
pretations, we try to read and feel how sport enables play reflection and
what the play act is shedding light on.
Sports carve out interpretive spaces that enable us to bend, break
and reshape personal meaning through culture (Bateson, 1972; Goffman,
1961; Winnicott, 1971/2005). To play with the idea of whether or not
sports are important, is to play with what is vital to our societies, for
belonging in our communities. But also a way to act on these issues and
to feel its weight. Broadcasting-play has spurred quite some digital cre-
ativity in this regard. The manipulation of games in promotions of high
profile sports. Music stars, Hollywood actors, and brands joining to cre-
ate sacred-like celebrity athletes. Also during the events, the producer is
carefully placing culture into sport to make it jingle. At the world skiing
championships in 2011, the Norwegian producer used a keyboard to add
the sound of poles hitting the snow as cross-country skiers were passing
the camera. While the upper deck was empty during the 2015 Diamond
League event in Paris, television viewers were offered a jam-packed sta-
dium. Broadcasters are putting the crowd in front of the camera when
they have a crowd, rearranging them when the crowd is small, and digi-
tally creating one when the crowd goes missing.9 The sound and size of
the act shapes our experience (McCormick, 2009). Its cultural proofs of
economic, social, and moral investments influence how we are immersed
in the play. At its core, whether the event is global or local, we can share,
almost touch our interest and investment that has now taken the form of
a game (Geertz, 1973). Handball, in other words, is only fun to those
who buy into the myth of performance and that relish in the thrill of
victory and the agony of defeat:
B: Will he cheat us again, the Danish coach? We almost had this one
[won].
A: But we got too impatient. We got too eager in trying to hammer
down the very last nail [in the coffin, winning the game]. Instead,
52 T. B. BROCH
the hammer has missed repeatedly. We have started hammering at

our own thumb. It hurts!
Interpretation plays with love and hate, pain and joy, the sacred and
the profane in the form of success and failure. “Are we really going to
realize our goals and dreams, or will we fail once more.” Only in the
aftermath of the game will we know, “after it has ripped our nerves to
shreds,” whether we are left in “heaven or hell.” The sport narrative, its
quest structure, allows us to foresee this possibility of the unpredictable
and affective outcome. It primes us in anticipating conclusions we cannot
know for sure and in an analysis that links deep meaning and bodies in
iconic flows. Body movements are always “already shaped by the expec-
tations and appreciations that spectators bring with them to the game”
(Gumbrecht, 2006, p. 151). Sport fans, at the arena and in front of their
media, can take part in the sport enchantment that is almost within reach,
even countries apart (Hognestad, 2003). Feeling the drama, entering into
it, taking part in it, being absorbed by it, ripples through the body:
A: NOW…, just seconds away from the epic fight, the battle of Scan-
dinavia, here in Ostseehalle in Kiel. It does not get any more beau-
tiful, more exciting than this. Every single hair on the body is stand-
ing right up! And, some of us have quite a lot of hair (laughing).
So, we can feel it on our bodies, the excitement. To be or not to
be–for the two Scandinavian countries.
To understand how sports can give you the goosebumps, the epicness
of a battle cannot merely be metaphorical. It is the surface expression
generating an iconic awareness of something tickling under our skin to
shape bodily anticipations of the game. To the journalist, goosebumps
provide the visual signs he can send as auditory proofs to his audience. It
is the materialization of the whole meaning system fused in the sporting
quest. It is not simply the presence of athletic bodies on a hardwood
floor. It is the meaning structures that are shaping our expectation of
what can happen when athletic bodies step onto the playing field. As a
sensuous experience, the surface of the goosebumps, is brought about
and reverberates fused meaning structures. The immediacy of the game
scripted quest, the sacred aura that makes king and country come to a
standstill, the athletes’ possibly sacred devotion to game sacrifice, and the
certainty of the unpredictable outcome.
While the play of sports is set apart from mundane life, time and space
do not cease to influence the game.10 In team sports like handball, soc-
cer, and basketball, space is an absolute measure drawn by sidelines and
centerfield circles that carve out the fields shaping athletic behaviors and
that turns defense to transition into attacks. An elite handball match lasts
for 60 minutes of regular playtime. The referee, as an absolute enforcer
with a whistle, can blow life to the game and, just as easy, take its life
away “The ref called it, that’s life.” Indeed, sports have their own worlds,
a reimagined and enchanted remake of the world and the natural laws
that surround its play. Materiality does not cease to exist here. Women
and men athletes do not cease to be women and men bodies. On the
contrary, the body, the arenas on which they move, remain material enti-
ties shaped by meaning. Whether sacred or polluted, the corporal athletic
act does not lose its place in this world. A sacred stone, with sacred qual-
ities, is still also a stone (Eliade, 1975). For the uncaring, there is not
much that separates the sacred body from that of the profane. For the
enthusiast, who knowingly or unconsciously lets herself be guided by the
meaning system that makes athletic purity, the sport icon manifests the
joint power of culture and materiality. In his presence, you can get goose-
bumps. Heroic narratives become somewhat sensible of what the sacred
athlete can accomplish. “Lars Jørgensen is sly like a fox,” “Michal Knud-
sen is tough like stone” while the rest of “the Danish defensive wall is
cracking open.” Material life is fitted out with narrative and codes giving
elaborate meaning to human life. When this is done, attackers can “make
the impossible possible” and when a 50 save percentage is world-class,
the goalie with 60, “is on his way to space – where there exists stars most
of us have never seen. It can hardly last throughout the second half. Let’s
just hope he plays on average.” Drawing the line between fiction and
reality in these instances becomes less relevant as to studying what the
narrative script and its actors tell us about how meaning systems generate
goosebumps and direct the materialities of the quest.
Transcending Time: Handball and Viking Warriors

In the Nordic countries, around year 800–1000, people were already
telling tales of sport, physical culture, and power. It is said in the Ynglinga
Saga that it was Odin, the educator, warrior and chieftain god, who taught
the Vikings their sports (Bjarnason, 1905). This sense of sport was broad,
54 T. B. BROCH
fusing spiritual and bodily knowledge, the art of poetry and warrior skills.
Considered the physical and cognitive exercise of kings and gods, a praise-
worthy athlete carried the prospects of a credible warrior and was placed
at the apex of an honor system uniting first name, family and society
(Bjarnason, 1905; Goksøyr, 2008). If we are to believe the historian, this
was an important narrative in the development of sport in the Nordic
countries, and if we are to read its return in contemporary history books,
it still is.
It is not only in history books that the image of the Viking recurs
in contemporary Norway. The mascots of the 1994 winter Olympics in
Lillehammer were two Viking children, Håkon and Kristin. A debate,
and eventually a refusal, arose when the national jersey of the Norwegian
national soccer team was equipped with a Viking emblem. When Norwe-
gian soccer club RBK played the Danish FCK for a spot in 2010/2011
Champions League, the games were promoted as a war of Vikings. The
metaphor is, perhaps most prominently, evoked when the sporting nation
of Norway fights Iceland. It is a common conception in Norway that the
unhospitable Iceland was populated by the toughest of Norwegians. Our
lexical knowledge tells that Iceland’s history begins around the year 800.
While “Irish monks were thought to be the first settlers of Iceland, they
vanished when the Norwegians arrived.”11 In keeping with the traditions
of passing on their father’s first name to their children,12 Iceland remains
to many Norwegians the Saga Island reevoking our own cultural pasts.
During the 2016 European championships in soccer, a Norwegian jour-
nalist reported on “The saga of the Icelanders,” saying that “Not since
the Viking era have Norwegians felt the familial bonds to Iceland more
strongly than at the moment Iceland defeated and sent England pack-
ing” (Hoffengh, 2016). This romantics of play, heritage, and civilizations,
Huzinga (1938/1950) would have appreciated.
In the 2011 handball World Championship, the Norwegian men’s
team was facing their neighboring rivals from Iceland. Under a picture of
two vicious-looking Icelandic players tackling an Austrian opponent, the
journalists Haraldsen and Langsem (2011) report “Going to war. Iceland
is going to war. So must the Norwegians, if they are going to have any
chance” of victory. The Icelanders are “standing ready with shields and
swords,” a Norwegian player says and the journalist spins on that “the
handball boys predict war against the Saga people.” There are of course
no shields or swords allowed on the court. And yes, the journalist’s job
is to produce entertainment, fun. As researchers we have to be careful of
Huzinga’s romantics, but the Durkheimian legacy has told us to take fun
seriously. Not in a word by word fashion, but in revealing what generates
an awareness of the situation. This will provide an analytic advantage as
we enter the Norwegian youth sports arena later. In sport, the need for
myths about chance, fears, and hopes remains in modernity. The journal-
ists show us that there is no clean break from enchantment in modernity.
The enchantment of competition and physical contest reappears in the use
of national cultural repertoires of meaning (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000;
Spillman, 1997). In the scripted life of sports, social chance is reshaped in
the aesthetics of the quest, in myth making about real bodies and abstract
moralities transcending time. Before we, with some more precision, move
on to explore how meaningful sports intersects with gender, we need to
consider the internal structures of something even more fundamental than
sport itself: competition.
The poetics of Snorre Sturlason dating back to the 1220s and his
recounting of Odin’s ghost warrior, the Einherjer, guides our excava-
tion of meaningful competition. Setting the stage by analogy, Norse myth
includes situations and destinies that direct our focus to the powerless and
the defeated. It tells us how the smallest among us prevail in the world
of the colossal and how seemingly trivial detail can both interrupt and
restore cosmic equilibrium. In the Snorre-Edda, Sturlason (1950/2008)
presents Norse myth in an exchange of poetics between king Gylve and
three gods. Through the discussion, the Norse vernacular, its characters
and worlds are revealed. The human Gylve keeps questioning and digging
for answers. At times, the gods are puzzled by his curiosity and naiveté
of the obvious nature of their world. They are, nonetheless, patient with
Gylve and tell him that among those residing in Åsgard, the world of
the gods, are also the Valkyries. These women gods were sent by their
chieftain Odin to select the warriors who must die by weapon on the bat-
tleground and thereafter return them to Odin’s home Valhall. Here is
where the fallen warrior becomes Einherjere who shall guard the gods on
Ragnarok, doomsday when the Fenris wolf comes.
There must be plenty of space in Valhall if Odin is housing all these
fallen warriors, Gylve wonders. But, what can Odin offer them during
their stay, he asks. It is true as you say, there are already many there and
many more will come, but they will seem too few when the wolf attacks,
the gods answer. Yet rest assured, there is no shortage of food at Val-
hall they tell Gylve. The fallen warriors dine with Odin, eating the boar
Sæhrimner that is cooked in the kettle Eldrimne [Eldhrimnir] by the chef
56 T. B. BROCH
Adrimne [Andhrimnir]. Every day the boar resurrects and every night it
is slaughtered anew. Does Odin eat the same food as his warriors, Gylve
wonders. The boar’s meat brought to Odin’s table, he serves to his two
wolves. Odin only dines on wine, the gods answer. Well, while feasting on
the boar, what do the warriors get to drink, water perhaps? Gylve keeps
asking. That is a strange thing to ask, do you really think Odin invites
kings and chieftains to serve them water, the gods reply. The Valkyries
serve the ghost-army mead that steadily pours from the teats of the goat
Heidrun that grazes on the roof of Valhal. Gylve is in awe of Odin’s
might, his home and army, but cannot help to wonder what the army
does to entertain itself when it is not drinking. The gods answer that,
every day, as soon as they have dressed, they fetch their weapons and step
onto the courtyard where they slay each other. This is their play. After the
game, the Einherjers ride home to dine together (Sturlason, 1950/2008,
p. 62, my translation).
While the meaning of specific sports, cultural history, myths, and nar-
ratives are altered by time and context, they remain, if remembered, part
of our cultural landscapes. However, there is more to it than what ripples
on its surface. From the mythical abyss drums existential problems and
answers. The Einherjer is a symbolic warrior, much like our athletes of
today, arbitrarily standing in for something else. With the possibility to
play fight for a living, they are both aesthetically directed by and evoke
moral meaning systems of chance, life, and death. Tryouts for Odin’s
army were quite brutal, but in many ways as reliant on a chosen few
eyes spotting you. They are no longer called Valkyries, but scouts are now
traveling the globe to find talent. Of course, the battle does not end when
a symbolic warrior becomes part of the elite. On any team, you have to
steadily battle and prove yourself to belong among your peers, and, at the
end of the day, attempt to bury the hatchet, envy, and pains to “unite.”
The final challenge always awaits, if only in dream, of the epic fight, of
basketball dream teams, of hockey magic on ice, the ultimate test. Our
modern champion athletes are, perhaps, more god-like than ever before.
Escorted in private or team vehicles to the domes in which they take to
the field of combat. So viciously high earning they reside in communities
far away from and high above those paying to cheer them. We still reward
and let our champions hoist the cup and have a sip from the power-teat
of culture as we immerse in the symbolism of chance.
A highly successful performance, whether in narrative recapitulation, or

sporting acts, becomes ritual-like if we no longer see them simply as sto-
ried realities, but start feeling its cultural depth. This enchantment carves
out liminoid arenas in which the moral binaries that the plot characters
maneuver, of belonging, good and evil, inform us of ourselves and of our
societies.13 What comes to fall outside of our codes are often discarded.
Yet in certain times, and in certain spaces, anomalies become the source
of great power. The revelation of a sacred and absolute moral reality. On
the battlefield, the Einherjer stands with one foot in Midtgard (mundan-
ity) and one foot in Åsgard (the sacred world). On the field of play, the
handballer stands with one foot on the court and one foot in the social
worlds that surround her. Handball is both a game performance and a
social performance. The game is made meaningful by a swirl of culture
structures that has settled upon their symbolic and material forms. Their
social significance is an issue of our capabilities for meaning making, of
our experiencing of felicity and possible achievement of iconic flow. Out
of our play with the symbolic warrior, complexities are crystallized in the
artifacts that condense our meaning system:
A: Welcome back to Ostseehalle in Keil. It is a boiling atmosphere.

10 200 spectators have come to see Norway play Denmark. It all
comes down to who gets a spot to play for the cup, a spot among
the great - and - who has to do placement play, with those much,
much smaller.
Distinguishing between the great and the small deals with the prospect
of capturing meaning in material form—iconicity. It is not only that pro-
fessional handball players tend to be large, tall, and heavy, but that at the
pinnacle of achievement, they can become great by fusing background
codes with pragmatics. Not all games become miracles, not many teams
are all that dreamy. Be sure, sport media will make the most of it, when
the situation occurs, to unite social meaning and sensation, to re-fuse
notions of courage and bodily movements in the hope of an icon. In
contrast to the times recounted by Sturlason, the time it takes for myth-
making about corporal-moral ontologies to be “penciled down” and dis-
tributed, has catalyzed in modernity. The corporal materialities that con-
dense diverse meaning systems have proliferated. As we make way back
to this book’s main narrative, we need to complement the critical theory
58 T. B. BROCH
temptation to reveal current women oppression, with the historian’s incli-

nation to excavate the perhaps hidden and not yet documented women
power of the past.
Prominent and pop-cultural conceptions of the Viking age sketches it
as primarily founded on material and political power of hegemonic mas-
culinity. Løkka (2014) argues that this theorizing is fundamentally flawed.
Women held sizable power in medicine, production of goods, and in the
transmission of culture and values that are not reducible to the hege-
monic masculinity model. Plausibly, Løkka claims, “there existed parallel
hierarchies.” In myth, Kjesrud (2014) revives the powerful Brynhildr, a
women hero of the time, with remarkable willpower and courage. With
the power to demand and persuade men, she was a shaper of knowledge.
In sum, Mundal (2014) claims that the Norse perspective on women can
be explained by their cultural perception of biological inheritance. Their
meaning system, Mundal argues, with two gender roles, but one set of
positive character traits for both sexes could be explained in the biologi-
cal manner that children are produced by and thus also equally shaped by
both father and mother. Norse myth thus also holds women heroes and
ideals capable of possessing the same traits valued in and shared with men.
Importantly, to the historian, women holding this power were not turned
into men but esteemed as powerful women. The ideal Viking woman
should not be kind, docile, and passive, but a woman of action. In so
doing, she reproduced women power.
When the Norwegian women team was facing off against Denmark in
the 2010 European championship semifinals, to music as energizing as
any blockbuster movie trailer, the narrator tells us that “The Norwegian
girls travel to a cauldron of epic proportions.” Visually, we are led into
a dome with a roaring audience. To the court, onto which the feet of
athletes’ march, in line, into the prism of contest. “They are on the road
and will not have any help from the bleachers.” Norwegian high-fives
are shared and the team captain is caught gazing overhead. “The two
giants of the European Cup will battle for a ticket to the final.” The
promo speeds up to the sound of the Danish coach urging his players
to “tackle, tackle, tackle!” Hands in, nail polish and sports tape, break,
game on. “It is going to be real a hate game.” Bodies collide, flags wave,
goals are scored. “It is going to be all out war,” the Danish coach tells
us and a Norwegian player echoes his words, “it’s going to be top notch
warring.” Bodies fly. The audience screams. Goals are scored, players roar,
fists clenched. Music fades and the handballgirls take the field in real time.
Large sounds signify large events. Epic compositions signify the possi-
bility of epic acts. By uniting coaches, players, prior game play, and com-
mentary, the broadcaster tells the tale of the warrior-like courage and
character of the Norwegian women. In this battle of giants and in any
game involving chance, immersion in enchantment, even magic can tilt
the game in either direction. The renowned captain of the Norwegian
team, Gro Hammerseng-Edin, is caught gazing up. The arena has a ceil-
ing, possibly centered by a jumbotron, so there is no looking at the sky.
Yet we are left with the sense that Edin is asking a question, as if she
is looking for reassurance in drawing a full breath to fill her lungs. We
know she knows that the time has come to separate the great from the
much, much smaller. The attraction of the game resides on the interstice
between her game skills, play immersion, and our ability to liquefy the line
between her act and our cultural depths. When magic sparks and enchant-
ment drums, codes and acts have snapped into alignment. A comparative
look to the less renowned Norwegian men team reinforces this inclination
to read sport as performative attempt at flow. During yet another one of
their failures, in the 2008 European Cup, journalist Sæther (2008) poet-
ically recaps that in the handballboys’ effort and results, “there was no
sign of magic.” Instead there was “just a meaningless backhand pass, an
error, and yet another spoiled attack.” Iconic flow structures our piece-
meal experiences and allows us the use of symbols to express prelinguistic
and deep meaning of competition and chance—both of success and of
failure—for the athlete and journalist alike.
The element of chance, courage, and hopes continue to shape our
attraction to the sporting quest. As sports elaborate what it means to
be human and crystalizes many of our common-sense banalities, sports
need various narrative genres to justify its narrative register. Even in Norse
mythology, the gods did not only do battle by the axe, but with wits.
Once, Tor lost his hammer Mjølner. Borrowing Føya’s feathered cloak,
Loke flies to visit the thief troll Trym who promises Tor his hammer back
if only the gods would make Frøya his bride. When asked, Frøya snorted
in contempt. To get back his hammer, Tor therefore had to dress up in
women’s clothes and act to be Frøya. When Tor arrived at Frøya’s wed-
ding, Trym was quite impressed as “she” ate an ox, eight fish and drank
three kegs of beer. Tor’s partner in crime, Loke, had to make a quick per-
formative to enable Trym to see that Frøya had been so anxious before
the wedding that she had not been able to eat for eight days straight. Yet,
when Trym lifted Frøya’s wedding veil he was startled once more, now
60 T. B. BROCH
by Frøya’s looks. She has not slept for eight days, Loke quickly made him
see. Trym called on the wedding gift Mjølner and Tor laughed as he once
more held it in his hand. Fair to say, this does not end well for Trym.14
Playing Tunisia in the 2009 World Championships, the, perhaps, most
renowned hard-hitting player of the Norwegian women team, Heidi
Løke, got struck in the face and had to take a seat on the bench. Well
seated, “there comes her smile,” the journalist cheerfully stated. “I believe
she has gotten a genuine Donald-like-bump on her forehead.” Like the
ones that only Disney can animate, growing by the second. “Yes” the two
commentators laugh, “that forehead, I have not seen anything like that,
not since last Christmas issue from Duckburg. That is the worst [bump]
ever,” they laugh. “Yep, she takes a real blow (to the head) right there.”
As they watch the replay they, just for a second, feel a bit guilty. “It’s
bad manners to laugh, but Løke does so herself, and so does the whole
bench. It just popped out of her forehead.” It has been some game. Nor-
way is winning comfortably, but now also “Løke has to take a seat” due
to injury. Thankfully, “Breivang is back” from her injury. They are both
“hard nose” players, but “it is important for Norway that it was only a
minor blow” and that Løke will get back on her feet. Løke is “benched
with ice on her bump, smiles and laughs. It is not a bump on Heidi Løke’s
forehead, it is a horn,” the journalist declares. “This one goes on Twit-
ter.” Devilish performances can leave dints and bumps in discourse and
materiality.
Any well-rounded person, in the time of the Vikings and today, like Tor
and Heidi, knows that their games will present them obstacles unthought
of. Both Tor and Heidi are known for taking matters into their own hands
and not to think so highly of themselves that they fail to resolve their
quest. Tor’s apatite is proof of his strength and size, not realized as exclu-
sive to men by Trym, but a performative of power and the imagined force
of the goddess Frøya. If we are to believe current historians of the Viking
age, men and women were held accountable to the same moral codes.
An ideal woman was not thought to be less of a woman if she met these
standards. Yet, we should not expect her acting out these sacred qualities
in every aspect of life (Mundal, 2014). Løke’s horn is not only an index,
a sign of the direct link to the biology of toughness, but also a symbol of
her utmost dedication to the meaning system of toughness. Evidently, it
is not thought of as exclusive to men, but as evidence of her tough act.
Tor’s appetite and Løke’s horn are material-mythical proofs of their nar-
rative and performed authenticity. While both stories connote corporal
power, humor also teases out the actors shrewd ambitions, underscores
the positive aspects of the act and relaxes inclinations to think otherwise.
Myths entertain and inform us that our shared morals, the ways in which
they purify and pollute, does not necessarily corrupt gender. Values and
power that is not found in the hegemonic masculinity-model hierarchy of
Connell (1987, 2005) can exist in parallel hierarchies.
Importantly, while Norse and modern myth romanticizes certain ideas,
this does not make the journalist, her audience or the researcher into cul-
tural dopes and hopeless romantics that accept this universe as truth. This
would be a truly ill found reading of my text so far and its continuation
when disagreements and criticism becomes a more prevalent theme. Yet,
we cannot disregard enchantment. It is what attracts us to seeing how
sport mirrors or distorts society. Culturally contingent acts make it plau-
sibly so. Lasting attraction is found in sports’ leeway for meaning-making
that condense and adorn social life. A loss of attraction makes us leave
the show. The prospect of enchantment gives sport a considerable cultural
force. The meaning of its dramas is universally resting upon its possibility
to present us with a theatre of our own existential and moral problems.
Here the play is organized by a universal game structure allowing cul-
turally and historically specific myth making to be put in play. Part II of
the book shows us how interrupted enchantment and not being allowed
to share in iconic flow can make teenage girls’ and boys’ eyes watery at
the youth-sport arena. It has very real affects. First, however, we need
to finish the analysis of sport, media and gender. I begin by outlining the
institutional code of handball before exploring when and how it intersects
with broadly available representations of social life, gender and justice.
The Generative Grammar: Cognitive

Simplifications that Shapes Sport
The sport journalist works to interpret how athletes resolve the orga-
nized game interaction. In handball, the formal rules are about the same
for men and women. Like hockey and soccer, teams alternate between
defensive, transitional, and attacking phases in which the ultimate goal,
in handball, is to throw the ball passed the opposing netminder and into
the goal. When defending the goal, players are allowed to tackle attack-
ers, not from behind, but chest to chest and try to grab a hold of the
attackers shooting arm. While sport fans quarrel about what sport is the
62 T. B. BROCH
toughest (like during the 2011 men World championships, Swedish jour-
nalists declared that handball was tougher than hockey, as players wear no
pads, tackle aggressively, but never start brawling). It suffices to define
handball as a power and performance sport. Participants maneuver rule-
governed aggression in combination with physical skills (Coakley, 2009).
In handball, institutionalized culture codes allow the journalist to inter-
pret this interaction and allow the athlete to develop meaningful strategies
of action within the game’s well-defined interaction.
These codes are a cognitive simplification of the many aspects that
the game consists of. It is a discursive structure that guides the game
by reducing performance complexities into a matter of sacred and pro-
fane strategies of action.15 Particulars about how and where to shoot
the ball are reduced to an issue of focus or lack thereof. Metaphorically
being awake or half asleep. Details about the concerted timing of individ-
uals and team actions are assessed with controlled aggression. The myr-
iad relational actions of rival individuals and teams can thus be quickly
assessed by the coded rhythms of “stepping up” and daring instead of
“backing down” and shying away from body contact. These simplifica-
tions are equally prominent in women and men handball in Norway. To
make this perfectly clear, the immediately following analyses are compar-
ative and highlighted by references to whether the game commentary is
retrieved form men’s or women’s tournaments. This allows me to outline
a culture structure that cuts across the sex binary of handball. It allows
me to explore how meaningful handball shapes gender and how actors
use gendered repertoires to give this athletic act a social significance that
deepens and broadens our experience of its drama.
To be successful in handball, as in football, hockey, and rugby, players
use their bodies as tools, as weapons, to restrict the opponents’ move-
ments and allow their own (Messner et al., 2000; Trujillo, 1995). On
defense, the athletes’ actions are interpreted by the play by play commen-
tators in regards to whether they are making appropriate stoppages in the
oppositions’ play. These ebbs and tides of a game direct its social interac-
tion moving on in the sport quest. It becomes crucial to interrupt your
opponent’s rhythm and maintain your own. This is a shared truth often
named momentum. On defense, it is all about breaking your opponent’s
rhythms with well-timed and concerted acts of aggression:
A: We will see if Spain gets into that pace, that aggressiveness we

feel and know they are capable of.
B: I am hoping we will get to see a defense that moves sideways and

that we are even rougher, even better in the dueling game [player
vs. player]. Tonje Larsen gets body contact. That is important, that
we manage to make those stoppages [in play] (Women, WC09).
A: Tine Stange stops Mangue.
B: Good [job] by Stange there. [She] Is aggressive, takes the step
forward, hits the Spanish player eight and half meters out [from
the goal area line]. That is what we witnessed in the semifinal
between Spain and France yesterday – they [Spain] were trampled
so badly from the start that they really did not want to step inside
the 9 meter [line]. And every time they did, they got banged up.
A: It has to [bang] (Women, WC09).
Body contact is used to wear out opponents physically, mentally, and

to disrupt the social patterns of your opponent. When an attacking player
steps inside the 9-meter line, she enters the “defense’s territory,” in which
attackers are to be “punished” physically. If a defender does not step up,
from a 6–7-meter stance by the goal-area line, the attacker will most likely
have a god chance of taking a jump shot over the defense. When mount-
ing an efficiently aggressive defense, the onomatopoetic expression of an
explosive bang is used in evaluating how attackers are discouraged by the
sound of a disrupted attack. The French team is so applauded. Being
aggressive on defense becomes a criteria for evaluating if, how and why a
team is able to maintain their defensive rhythm and breaking the attack:
B: The Icelandic team moves around well. They are in front, they
are being aggressive. As mentioned in the halftime break, they do
not stand around waiting. They are tackling on defense, they move
up, they are aggressive and are therefore also able to interrupt the
offense. Look here. He grabs his arm, and continues to try to steal
the ball (Men, EC10).
B: It all comes down to rising up to that level of play and winning
those duels, to be willing to take those bangs [hits] that are coming
our way, that we know are coming. We have to put some force
behind it all.
A: That this [game] was going to be rough, that we knew (Men,
WC07).
64 T. B. BROCH
The semiotic opposition of being aggressive is a display of passivity.

Standing around, hands along your side or on your waistline, is not a win-
ning formula. Being aggressive on the handball court means that you are
in control, not “waiting around” to see what happens, but making things
happen yourself and as a team. Handball players’ bodies are primed to
endure the physical aspects of the game, but this does not mean that being
banged up does not take its toll. Facing a considerably weaker opponent,
players will at times, as best they can, avoid physical wear and tear, and
some coaches will try to rest their star players. However, when the going
gets tough, against weaker, equal and better teams alike, the journalists
are quick to pollute the athletes that do not fully commit to the illusory
conception of sport sacrifice. Regardless of the level of play of your oppo-
nent, you better not fall asleep:
B: We have to wake up.

A: Ah, Neagu [the Romanian star player], that’s just brilliant.
B: Edin is way too passive. Neagu gets to move around, right, left,
bouncing around. That is where you have to get out [to tackle]
before the shot comes.
A: Yes… the Norwegian coach calls a time out (Women, WC09).
A: There she comes. Hammers the ball into the net, like she has
done repeatedly for her Slovenian club-team.
B: It is a fine shot. We are passive though. We have to step up
(Women, WC09).
B: We are too passive at the center positions of our defense. We are
not able to get up front. They are attacking our defensive cen-
ter. Now we really have to be as determined when we attack their
goal… Brilliantly played by Alstad, but a week finish by Johansen.
A: Just one of several week finishes. The reason why Norway, that
led the game 3-1 after 4 minutes, is now behind 5-6 (Women,
WC09).
The lack of aggression, being passive or metaphorically falling asleep is

a radical reduction of a complex game involving seven individual players
on each side that are playing with an enormous amount of options avail-
able at every step. While the Romanian player is called out as brilliant,
the Norwegian defense is presented as drowsy, as the Romanian superstar
scores. It is a common Norwegian saying that a superior team can leave
their opponent “parked” or “standing still.” It applies to handball as well:
F: It is just too naive. We are standing still, waiting for them to

attack us. We know that they are going to shoot from a distance,
so we have to step up. Løke stands still and backs up. No one is
interested in stepping up and making the tackle. It is just stupid
(Men, WC07).
A: We can use the 1., 2., 3., 4., 5., and 6. gear, but not the R. Let
the R be for backing out of the garage after the tournament has
finished. We have to step up, forward and up. Like Ege! Just like
Ege does! He saves the penalty shot (Men, EC08).
An aggressor does not back up or to back down. Controlled aggres-

sion is sacred and passivity polluted. It is “just stupid” going in reverse
and backing down from a tackle. Advancing, like the lonesome goalie
Ege on the penalty shooter, makes for a far better play. The meaning
of aggression and passivity itself is thus formed by the code. Aggression
becomes sensible and passivity an unwise and dangerous tactic. Keeping
a high level of controlled aggression on defense has a pacifying effect on
the attacking team. It makes them physically and mentally fatigued, not
wanting to engage with the defense, stressed out and taking bad shots:
B: We are standing together. They [the opposition] are [only] mov-

ing sideways. Soon comes the passive signal [from the referee]
(Women, WC09).
B: Stands up, again, good. Good job by Tonje Larsen, steps up and
interrupts the passing lane. Now we are fighting, battling. We have
moved up, that half-a-step forward making it possible to get a hold
of them, grabbing at them all the time. The referees give Spain the
passive signal (Women, WC09).
On the attack, bursts of aggression are translated into a good tempo or

being speedy. As an attacker, you have to make sure to keep just the right
distance to the defense, engaging them, but not letting them catch you
and break your rhythm. Notably, like the shot clock in basketball, you are
even forced by the formal rules of handball to attack and shoot the ball.
If not, you face the threat of having your attack called off by the referees
enforcing the formal rule of “passive play.” From the standpoint of the
two in-game referees, seeing the attacking team as passive, as simply pass-
ing the ball around and not being committed to create scoring chances,
66 T. B. BROCH
they will raise their hand as a warning. Next, the referees make a subjec-
tive decision, evaluating if the attacking team is changing pace, actions
and taking the shot after about six passes. If not, the attack is called off.
There is little room for being passive:
B: We are being sloppy.

A: Stange is tackled and held down as she is about to pass the ball
to Løke. The referees signals the passive call.
B: We are standing still, every time, all the way.
A: Nøstvold takes a jump shot, off target. Nøstvold, almost char-
acterizes the Norwegian play. Started out good, Nøstvold scored
twice. After, it has just been a whole bunch of missed shots and
technical errors (Women, WC09).
B: If you would only attack the defense head on, instead of moving
sideways [alongside the defense]. Now here comes the passive signal
from the referees.
A: They have to shoot now. No, not in time. The referees blow their
whistle: passive (Women, WC09).
B: Here comes the passive signal. We are a little bit too hesitant.
A: Got to have tempo, moving the ball and our legs, against this
Spanish team that has really fired up defensively (Women, WC09).
It is not that the players are actually standing still on the court. How-
ever, they are not moving as fast, as resolute, or in the aesthetic patterns
and rhythms that the journalists prefer. In many ways, sport journalism,
but also being a sport coach and an athlete, is all about being able to get
into and read play rhythms. In studying chess, Fine (2015) names these
rhythms as lines of play involving the evaluation of prior, current and pos-
sible futures. Handballers make these decisions in stride. The routinized
cultivation of scripted actions enable athletes to make split-second deci-
sions based on somaticized skills and game patterns. “Reading the oppo-
sition like a book,” intuition itself, is, nonetheless, not stripped of mean-
ing. It involves the feeling of rhythmic flows inseparable from the cultural
pragmatics. The cognitive simplification of the game, into a binary of
sacred aggression and polluted passivity, guides the athlete’s experience
of mastery and enlightens the journalists’ aesthetic appreciation of the
game:
B: Cannot become passive! Buchman have to dare, dare to make

a play. They are stopping on the 9-meter line [far away from the
defense]. We have to engage the defense, get body contact and pass
the ball cleanly along (Men, WC07).
B: Samdal is too passive in his play.
A: Yes, now he is given a job on the sideline, [benched and] wiping
dirt off the ball. He does not take the chance [he was given] when
he had it. [And unfortunately for him] He did not have teammates
who were ready to play either (Men, EC10).
There is a Norwegian saying, “The one who nothing dares, nothing

wins” [Den som intet våger, intet vinner]. Still, in sport and social life,
success is an intricate matter. A “good” dose of aggression does little
to improve the act if it is not met by a joint performative effort and
appreciation. I do not intend to sell the journalists off short. What I am
suggesting is that the material and social reality of handball is in itself a
game play where performers are acting on “objective evaluation criteria.”
The most serious game interpretation involves shared play. Collins (2004)
shows how the journalists are really culturally right on in their reduction.
They are calling for the players to amass the emotional energy and the
speed they believe it takes to succeed in the game’s interactional ritual
chain:
B: There is something halfway about Dyhre Breivang, moving side-

ways. We have to be rougher, we must gather more speed, and we
must dare to go in [approach the defense] and take [the hits and],
get banged into.
A: Lunde-Borgersen searches for a passing lane. Gets tackled by
Vetkova (Women, WC09).
A: We are closing in on halftime. We are five goals behind.
B: It’s all about being, gathering even more speed, be even more
brutal in those movements towards the defenders, and dare to chal-
lenge. We pass the ball a little too early and we are too far away
from the [defensive] wall when we really are supposed to dare and
to press on (Women, WC09).
A: Run, run, run, run! Linka tries to slip between [the two defend-
ers]. She manages to force the ball into the goal. That is a great
accomplishment; takes quite a beating there. This is a powerful hus-
tle, edging the ball past [the goalie].
68 T. B. BROCH
B: Gets banged into to by Turey [Russian player]. [On replay, we]

See Turey steps in right there, and gives Linka a real blow (Women,
WC09).
Men and women handball players have to keep their composure while
facing the risk of physical injury and pain. Being scared diverts attention
away from attempts to make way through the culture-coded action. Away
from balancing their act amid a set of binary poles, feel the emotional
energy of equilibrium flow and actively shaping the game’s social life
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Winnicott, 1971/2005). Sports thus becomes
concerned with displays of character (Birrell, 1981; Goffman, 1967). Ath-
letes do not only apply game technical skills. They use their iconic con-
sciousness, a performative feel for the game, to shape the hard facts of bod-
ies, game life, and the final score. The journalists search for its energy, the
instances in which athletic actors strike a balance amid control and chance
to generate an iconic sensation of social power. Flow, is not simply an indi-
vidual awareness. It can be read off others. We can go looking for flow,
hinge onto it and experience it together:
B: Skjærvold hesitates to step into the duel. We need to be tougher

(Men, WC07).
B: When he makes up his mind, he can be the difference, Ivano
Balic. [When he] Really grinds his teeth (Men, EC08).
B: We make the sacrifice again, brilliant by Børge Lund. We miss
another shot, but we are at least willing to sacrifice ourselves picking
up the rebound – throwing ourselves into the goal area for a second
effort. We bat the ball back out, keeping possession of the ball
(Men, EC10).
A: New penalty shot awarded… Another save! He saves the shot with
his head! He gets it right [in the face], he gives it all for Norway!
Steinar Ege, takes it right in the face (Men, EC08).
In the play of sports, actors strive for excellence in competition with

real and imagined others (Gumbrecht, 2006; Mead, 1934/2015). To play
the game of handball well, you have to, literally, play tough. An appearance
of this truth can be achieved through mimicry, evoking an illusory char-
acter to fascinate oneself and the audience in such a way that the play spell
is not broken (Caillois, 1958/1979; Hamayon, 2016). When the goalie
of the Norwegian men’s handball team was going through a slump he,
according to the Norwegian press, turned it all around with “arms out,
roaring and ready for battle” (Holden, Overvik, & Delebekk, 2017). Tor-
bjørn Bergerud himself said that “it is all about wearing your hart on the
sleeve, and to present Torbjørn the handballer. This guy is pumped up,
roaring and a little bit noisy.” The modest, non-hegemonic masculine,
Norwegian had to step into character, put culture into his body, onto the
scene, to improve his play. The institutional code of handball makes such
role play a sacred asset of the tough athlete. You have to meaningfully
commit to it. You have to be tough and cannot be kind:
A: Postova breaks throu(uu)gh! Gets the goal…

B: We are way, way, way too kind. We have the opportunity to initiate
[body contact]. Riegelhuth has to be a lot rougher. We saw the
French girls earlier; they dove [into the opponents body] whenever
they tried to break through [their defense]. [They] were moving
forward. We cannot stand passively and wait. We do everything
perfectly on defense there, until we get a little distracted and lazy
towards the end (Women, WC09).
A: I am really not pleased with Mamelund’s shots. Mamelund, that
has taken a lot of punishment, seems a little worn down from all
his injuries. His thumb injury is interrupting his shot.
B: I think he is lacking speed, toughness.
A: Müller [German player] breaks through and scores the goal, while
shorthanded.
B: Just being too kind, really, in the dueling game. Have to grab a
hold of Müller when he attacks (Men, EC10).
As the play of handball can be shaped through acts of toughness, ath-

letes that allow others to dominate them are just too kind. The handball
code makes it so as it aligns passivity with kindness and as an opposite of
toughness in controlled aggression. Like Mundal (2014, p. 330) argues,
it is not as if passive women and men did not exist in Viking life, or
modernity, and that this at times was, and is, fine. But, this is not an
ideal way of being in a situation of struggle. In televised handball, iconic
flows are generated by concerted toughness. It narrows the play-focus of
athletes’ and coaches’ as they maneuver the social game script. If you are
not tough, but a bit too kind, and let your opponent direct the unfolding
70 T. B. BROCH
Table 2.1 The

Handball code
handball code delineates
the sacred and polluted Sacred Polluted
aspects of the Aggressive Passive
meaningful game Courage Cowardice
Sacrifice Selfishness
Tough Kind
drama, your chances of success are slim. The code directs relational on-
court adjustments in a quick and musical way, to the melody of contest,
and without the dissonance of too many details. While real life and play
are highly ambiguous, codes give clear feedback to allow the experience of
flow. In the “reality” of flow, one clearly knows what is “good” and what
is “bad” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, p. 46) as meaning-making play runs
the game tracks to create a seamless performance. In the media booth,
journalist make sense of these pulses. They are the theatre critics whose
job is to interpret, condense, and elaborate the momentum. They prime
the audience to get goosebumps as sport rhythms sway amid control and
chance in the sport quest. This aesthetics appreciation of a play agency
within the social game script, makes us attentive to how sports are guided
by a play code that rings in its material feeling (Table 2.1).
The Bang: Codes Generating Vocabularies

and Iconic Consciousness
Sports generate metaphors, myths, and narratives (Fine, 1987, 2015).
Within the institutional play, where the generative grammar of hand-
ball is a resource to make sense of and guide task-oriented actions, vari-
ous groups and communities generate key symbols that can connote the
whole system of signifiers, in one single word. In Norwegian handball, the
expression “bang” is key to unlock an iconic consciousness fusing sound
imitation, social action, and materiality.
The handball code not only produces jargon, but also vocabularies of
sound.16 “Smell” is steadily used depicting televised handball, as well as
in directing youth handball explored later. The English equivalent bang
serves as a useful translation. It does leave the occasional need for con-
textualization, but so does the Norwegian word smell.17 Bang is asso-
ciative with “a loud, sudden, explosive noise, such as the discharge of a
gun, a resounding strike or blow, to strike or beat resoundingly, to hit or
bump painfully, and to bang up, to damage” (Merriam-Webster, 1997).
As such, the bang’s onomatopoetic qualities, created and formed by a
sound imitation, are central. In handball, its meaningful sound fuses the
broad meaning mapped above foremost with three distinct contexts. The
team “banging against the wall.” The ball “banging towards the goal.”
And bodies “banging against each other.” Still, bang retains its multivocal
capacities and is therefore applicable in a multitude of situations:
A: Yes! A shot with a bang [smell ] – Finally!

B: (And that) On a fast break with some bang [smell ]. Brilliantly
played by the Norwegian defence (Men, EC08).
The fast break and the shot referred to above entail quite different
body movements. A fast break involves outrunning the opposition and
creating a one-on-one situation with the goalkeeper. A shot is ultimately
a matter of hand-eye coordination aimed at getting the ball past the goal-
keeper. However, they also share certain prospective characteristics. The
bang primarily refers to the content and quality of a loud explosive sound,
which also refers to both the fast break and the shot due to a perceived
similarity between the content and quality of a bang and the athletes’
corporal actions (Broch, 2011). The sound image packs the energy of the
handball code, the sudden bursts of energy that toughness can generate,
into a bang. It primes athlete for cathexis and the audience for psycho-
logical identification. We have to be open to the possibility of something
unexpected. A bang that merges the corporal movements of athletes with
the audiences to allow a bodily experience of the games’ aesthetic expres-
sion.
When an objective is not reached, a game is lost, or the team is knocked
out of the playoffs, the Norwegian commentator can describe it as a bang.
In the soap opera of handball, success is sacred, heavenly, and failure is,
well, hell. However, when being tough, but all the same losing, it can
feel a bit like a car crash at a high speed. All forward motion comes to a
sudden halt and a loud and explosive “action movie - Hollywood style”
sound erupts.
72 T. B. BROCH
A: The Norwegian team is trying to get on its feet after two fero-
cious bangs [grise-smeller] versus Sweden and France in their two
latest matches (Men, WC07).
A: How will the Norwegian team be able to perform collectively
after a couple of bangs [gå på en smell ] leading up to the World
Championship? (Men, WC07).
The bang of not reaching one’s goals is felt through the great forces
that are at work, or rather, that its forces have reached an impassable
wall and come to a sudden stop. This form of bang feels like a physical
metaphor for pain yet describes what is primarily dramaturgical or narra-
tive. The bang of a handball team or a player not winning a game might
lead to a shaken or damaged self-esteem. The audience might temporar-
ily lose hope. It can have material implications. The breakdown might
lead to the end of the tournament, the firing of the coach, or even more
critically (perhaps) the loss of sponsors and a decline in national interest.
More importantly, the sound expression bang elicits the cultural-cognitive
adjustment needed to get back on one’s feet. The crash of a handball team
leaves plenty of room for, even catalyzes the drama of the comeback kid
refusing retreat. Its damage can be amended by skilful actors and audi-
ences. Yet as an athlete and a coach, you have to pay attention. Failure
might leave you pacified to the thunderous sound of another round of
bangs:
A: Oh yeah, mistakes on the defensive side again and again. In

preparing for the game they (the athletes) have payed lots of atten-
tion to the right side – but here it bangs from the opposite side
time and time again (Women, WC09).
The dramatization entices our associating of the power play and serves
the purpose of including the novices in the audience who may not fully
understand the rules and regulations of handball. Newcomers to the game
may be acquainted with, able to play with and feel the ramification of a
symbolic bang and its material associations. While narratives of sport as
war are elaborated later, it should be noted at this time that the sound
of a bang in handball helps audiences appreciate the dramatic plot. As
a result, when athletes are portrayed as tough as warriors, their bodies
become weapons. Loud bangs and explosions logically follow:
A: Bangs right away from Mangue. She scores while her team is
shorthanded (Women, WC09).
B: We see more and more teams trying to slow down the tempo of
the game. Hoping to get a shot on goal, because they know, that
if they do not, if they lose possession of the ball, it will bang from
Norway immediately (Women, WC09).
A: Here comes Børge Lund! The jump shot which was five meters
off target in the first half, bangs [smeller] into the goal in the second
half! (Men, WC07).
A: Buchmann has scored three penalty shots earlier. This one bangs
[smeller] off the crossbar (Men, WC07).
Bodies are weapons. Arms are rifles. When they miss, they have to
adjust their rifle aim to throw the ball banging past the goalkeeper and
into the net. The bang from a shot conveys throwing strength and skill. Of
course, in reality there is no sound resembling a loud bang when a hand-
ball player throws the ball toward the goal. This motion does not produce
more sound than a pass to a teammate, although it might be thrown with
more force. Still, a good shot is often an unexpected and a tough shot
delivered with a bang and in such a swift way that the goalkeeper and
defense have little or no time to react. A banging sound may occur if
the ball hits a defending player’s hands (block) or if the ball hits the goal-
post. The sound of a shot hitting the goalpost, depending on if the player
scores or not, is the sound of a marginal advantage or disadvantage. It is a
sound of the muscular strength and technical skills enabling the player to
make the goalpost resound with a bang. However, the broadcasted bang
when the ball hits the net or when a shot leaves a player’s hand, is poetic.
Not just conveying sounds, the journalist produces sound. The shot was
fast and powerful. The shooter was strong, skilled, and bravely willing
to take the shot. For players are seldom free to shoot without defenders
physically trying to stop them. When handball bodies tackle, the aesthetics
of courage and sacrifice are revealed in material form. When athletes col-
lide, the linking of noise, destructive power, and romanticizing of physical
power is re-fused. For that reason, when such powers collide, damage is
a likely outcome:
A: We have broken down Romania’s most dangerous weapon: their

pivot.
74 T. B. BROCH
B: What is not so good is that Alstad gets a real bang on her thumb.
Has been a little too many of those (injuries). Needed a huge bag
of ice earlier. Has to take a seat after the rough treatment she gets
when Amarei broke through (Women, WC09).
A: This looks more serious than I like.
B: She is often on the ground Karoline Dyhre Breivang, gets banged
up a lot. But, she seldom stays down this long. Gets a bag of ice.
She is really hurting down there (Women, WC09).
B: Gal gets banged up real bad [ordentlig smell ], down on the Hun-
garian bench – blood is pouring from his nose (Men, WC07).
B: He gets banged up [smell ] in that situation […] Joachim Boldsen
(Danish player). He also has to leave the game and take a seat on
the bench. Receives a heavy bang [ordentlig smell ] on the finger
(Men, WC07).
While banging into the wall and shooting with a bang are perhaps best
understood as arising from the nonmaterial to the sound image of a mate-
rial object, the bang erupting from a tackle is fundamentally material in
its source and consequence. Tackles are often referred to simply as bangs,
with costs ranging from bruises and torn ligaments to broken bones. The
word violence is not part of the everyday Norwegian vocabulary of hand-
ball. Rather, to play the game one must accept and be able to dish out a
bang and to withstand a bang. It is part of its affective dramaturgy. The
bang reveals important insights into a rich game performance. Success
is not simply decided by the outcome of a game but also dramaturgical
excellence. The stakes can be physical, cognitive, aesthetic, or all of the
above. Immersion and performative effort is key. It has to be dramatic.
In the words of the commentators, “it has to bang”:
B: We need more tempo. It is all too slow, we are too late, we

cuddle a little too much with the ball. We are too far away from
the defense. We have to engage, challenge, get banged up, draw a
defensive player and pass the ball to a teammate with an open shot
(Women, WC09).
B: We are being way too kind again. Right there (on the replay), it
has to bang. Skjærvold hesitates about stepping into the duel. We
have to get tougher (Men, WC07).
On defense, chances are that a great player will score on you even if
you bang into her. However, you have to signal to yourself, your team-
mates, your opponent, and to the audience, that you believe that tough-
ness can direct the contest. A good opponent is an adversary that coop-
erates in this performance, as if she takes the game seriously. If not, there
is no real play. Observations in youth handball will elaborate this claim
later and reveal the moral detriment of games if they are performed in a
noncooperative way. For now, the word “bang” shows how anticipation
is primed for a psychosomatic identification with the meaning system of
handball, in a crystallized form. Not all those watching have felt a game of
handball, but they can feel the bang. This is, after all, what the journalists
are doing—performing psychological identification. Gumbrecht (2006)
argues that meaning analyses of sports tend to exclude the material ref-
erent, the object holding both the signifier and the signified. With iconic
theory, this no longer has to be so, as we account for how the material
body evokes and is shaped by meaning systems. The bang is meaningfully
associated with the game play due to a perceived similarity between the
content and quality of its sound and of the athletes’ corporal actions. It
is evoked by the game’s aspects of toughness and settles on the form of
its play rhythms—as the ball is shot, blocked, and hits the crossbar—as
material objects move in duets of collision. Through processes of iconic
consciousness, audiences are allowed to join in this experiencing of mate-
riality. For those who achieve cathexis and psychosomatic identification,
the bang opens up a passage for a corporal and performative feel for the
game. Its meanings fuse presence in material form as the audience can
almost feel the bang trembling through their own body. The bang thus
has everything and nothing to do with sports. It is part of the landscape
making sports meaningful and that can thus travel back into a landscape
of familiar symbols and metaphors.
Notes
1. Messner (2002, 2013), Messner et al. (2000), Musto, Cooky, and
Messner (2017), and Wenner (2004).
2. An “effective” narrative requires sequential action and agency. It is
informed by pasts, directed toward a goal and ordered in a sequential
manner (Todorov, 1971/1977) allowing our narrative ideal-type charac-
ters to fit in and to be fitted out by situation and biography (Propp,
1923/1968).
3. I draw on Douglas’ (1966) work on the Pangolin cult and Eliade (1975)
notions of a hierophany in arguing that all the while binaries are important,
76 T. B. BROCH
so are its breaches that can be discarded as dirt, but at times become
objects of sacred power (Broch & Fasting, 2009).
4. The sacred and polluted, the beautiful and sublime, shape our experi-
encing of materiality in art (Alexander, 2008), in experiencing of one’s
own body (Champagne, 2018) and in reading sport rhythms (Gumbrecht,
2006).
5. https://snl.no/Snorres_Edda.
6. Despite recurrent public provocation caused by their expenditures, the
Norwegian royal family, the ways in which they speak solidarity and mod-
esty, have made them popular in today’s Norway. They also have many
iconic resources to support this verisimilitude. The iconic image taken
during the oil crisis of 1973, of King Olav on the city-tram, in his ski-
ing outfit, on his way to the skiing tracks, was re-created in December
2010 with the current king Harald, with the same side passenger that sat
beside his dad (Grønning, 2010). Still, whenever the royal castle is reno-
vated, whenever the medias get a hand on the family’s traveling expenses
or a newly acquired and outrages expensive home or family resort, social
dramas emerge.
7. Celebrating their 25 years at the throne in 2016, the Parliament’s gift to
the royal family was a “day out” on the University Plaza, in the middle of
Oslo city. Allegedly, the king and queen immediately contacted the Nor-
wegian Sport Confederation (NIF) asking for help to throw an open-for-
all children’s cross-country skiing festival (NTB, 2015). Nothing, perhaps,
is more stereotypically Norwegian than this combination of the cultural
elements of cross-country skiing and an active and healthy childhood in
the outdoors.
8. Inspired by Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Ring.
As Galadriel welcomes the fellowship she warns and comforts them, indi-
vidually and as a fellowship: “The quest stands upon the edge of a knife.
Stray but a little, and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while
the Company is true” (Tolkien, 1954/2014, p. 464).
9. The broadcaster of the 2015 Diamond League event in Paris “had us all
believing” that the empty stadium was packed (Bergh & Bakke, 2015). In
Norway, empty soccer stadium seats are covered with huge sponsor and
team-logo banners, even printed crowds, causing avid fans to question the
authenticity of the event.
10. Fine (2015) draws on Latorian ANT to show that while the chessboard
stays the same, time shapes its play in giving the participants a steadily
changing landscape for strategizing.
11. https://snl.no/Islands_historie.
12. With the additional ending of son or dottir (in English; son or daughter).
13. Communicative spaces betwixt and between, was by van Gennep (1960)
named ritual and defined as liminal. Turner (1982) argued that complex
societies are better understood as providing liminoid arenas, resembling

the liminal, but more accurately understood as play arising in leisure time.
14. See, for example, Freya’s Unusual Wedding (Gaiman, 2017) and Tor hen-
ter hammeren (Hansen, 1993).
15. While Swidler (1986) coined the term “strategies of action” used here,
I am less interested in how strong practice forms action and more con-
cerned with Tavory’sand Swidler (2009) later emphasis on how codes
guide action and thus emulates the study of cultural pragmatics (Alexan-
der, 2004).
16. This subchapter revises and augments the earlier publication “Norwegian
Bing Bang Theory” (Broch, 2011) written before I had worked with data
on women handball and cultural sociology.
17. The word smell, like bang, has a wide variety of meanings, but usually
connotes power and abruptness. For example, smell kyss (a smacking kiss)
and baksmell (come from behind bang: tax arrears).
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CHAPTER 3
Enchanted Fusion: Bringing Together Game

Play and Gender
There are many ways that a sport story can capture our attention. Sport
sociologists make us suspect that journalists keep our interest by repro-
ducing patriarchy. That the journalist glorifies men sport stars and pollute
women athletes through ridicule, infantilization, and marginalization. If
not blatantly so, forces of political correctness has made journalists con-
spire in producing bland stories of women athletes (Musto, Cooky, &
Messner, 2017). This is not a persuasive approach in studying Norwegian
journalists’ depictions of women’s handball. Here, “the Norwegian hand-
ballgirls are, alongside Grete Waitz,” seen as “the most powerful symbol
of a new and gender equal Norwegian society” (Sæther, 2007).1 After yet
another December of sky-high viewer ratings, Chief Editor of sports on
TV2, Bjørn Taalesen, told us that “the handballgirls are [to his audience]
what marzipan and ginger bread is to our Christmas preparations” (NTB,
2007). Of course, the critical theorist might argue that being “sweet
as marzipan” draws attention away from the women athletes’ physical
prowess, to reproduce a patriarchal capitalism. Yet, this critical analysis
clings to all too simple understandings of sport and social worth that is
shaped by the system it critiques. It ignores the hermeneutic power of the
journalist to think otherwise and misses how he situates sports in society.
Håndballjentene is not only positioned within Norway but also invested
with the power to represent the country. The journalists allude to the cul-
tural power of icons and the athletic heroines’ capacity to being shaped
by and in turn shape something greater than their corporal materiality:
Gender in the Norwegian public and private. While the marathon runner

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_3
84 T. B. BROCH
“Grete Waitz pushed the limits” of what we thought “girls were physically
capable of.” The handballgirls have “repeatedly demonstrated the power
of having two naturally emancipated sexes, with equal opportunities for
boys and girls. No other Norwegian sport makes a greater triumph for us,
than the handballgirls,” Sæther salutes the icon. Like the rallying slogan
of many second-wave feminists, the personal is political, the journalists re-
fuse a political war for gender equality and the private realm of a clichéd
holiday-preparation, to the sport quest of the handballgirl. These fields of
myth in which she is embedded, majority-ethnic Christmas traditions and
macro gender equality, take form in the institutionalized play of wom-
en’s handball. The journalists’ iconizing of the handballgirls invites us to
immerse with these fields of meaning through the material presence of
the woman athlete. Her visual surface of an aesthetic in-game toughness
and the codes of egalitarian individualism in Norway, jointly makes her
an icon of equality.
The following analysis explores how performances fuse institutional
play and national culture to shape gender. How an institutional code
(Spillman, 2012), that guides journalists’ shaping of the athletic perfor-
mance, intersect with a social performance (Alexander, 2004) bringing
broad culture into the scripted game quest. This process involves consid-
erable play creativity within and with our many social worlds. National
culture, the discursive fields of codes and narratives (Spillman, 1995,
1997), are brought into, guide and elaborate the reading of sporting
moralities (Archetti, 2003; Jijon, 2015). If fused, institutional and broad
culture join in meaning-making processes about success and failure in the
world of sports.
The First Sex of Norwegian Handball: The Iconic

Women Warrior
Having established a sense of the similarities that cut across the media
depictions of men’s and women’s handball, in the form of a handball
code, I move on to explore how meaningful sports shape gender. How
do journalists use gender in understanding sport actions that cut across
the sex binary? Coded similarities do not imply that gender is no longer
relevant. By far. As the institutional code of handball shapes pragmatics,
journalists reach for gendered myths and narratives to reflect on sport in
society. Yet, unlike the critical theorist, I and the journalist will not look
3 ENCHANTED FUSION: BRINGING TOGETHER GAME PLAY AND GENDER 85
for gender difference and place them in a hierarchy in which the mas-
culine is normative and the feminine is deviant (Beauvoir, 1949/2011;
Nielsen, 2014). Or, as a sport sociologist, equal toughness to hegemonic
masculinity and kindness to subordinate femininity to declare that tough
Norwegian men and women athletes breed global patriarchy. Instead, I
narrow attention to the first sex of Norwegian handball, before returning
to the men later on.
The notion of sport as war makes for an interesting departure. For the
critical theorist, the sport as war trope is central to a naturalizing of the
male power and women oppression (Gee, 2009; Jansen & Sabo, 1994;
Messner, 1994; Trujillo, 1995). We must be wary of this move as it dis-
courages us from studying if, why and how institutionalized play can nat-
uralize women’s power. As it blinds us in looking to see if sport, perhaps,
are equally well interpreted as a playing with a war in our landscapes of
equality. Indeed, representations of powerful women athletes are found
on every corner of the globe.2 Can the undeniably barbaric metaphor
of an iconic women warrior reverberate with civil struggle? Can the play
of war in sports be reasonably explained as a dramatic performance of
toughness in moral justice?
Not only the sound images of sport but also its visuals are vital. Moving
bodies provide the indexical meaning to elicit and guide our experienc-
ing of “the rawest [toughest] defensive work ever seen” by a Norwegian
national handball team, by its first sex:
B: Good job there too. [She] Is tough, stands up, and stands tall.
A: That’s a tackle in team handball, and also two points in wrestling.
B: [She] Never backs down in these situations, Karoline Dyhre
Breivang. We have seen it so many times and we have seen her
lie like this so many times [on the hardwood seriously hurt]. She
will surely get up on her feet this time as well. That poise, relentless
towards herself, she just dives in between the two defenders.
A: When she, with no helmet or no other protection than some pads
on her knees, just runs right into the concrete [defensive-] wall head
first – wow, I’ll give her that.
B: We have denied them space on the sides [of our defense]. […]
Good work by Malm Frafjord; in front of Manea when the pass is
delivered by Neagu.
A: Yes, we have packed [defensive players] tightly around their
attackers. It is the rawest [roughest and toughest] work I have ever
seen on defence [by Norway].
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With huge contemporary involvement of women in youth and elite

sports, a sport drama historically preserved for men now also surround
our women athletes. Evocative of traditionally masculine and male roles
as wrestlers and warriors, women bodies nevertheless do not seize to be
women. In the promos for the 2017 world championship the handball-
girls where revamped as super heroes by TV2. Using scenes from previous
games, they made the ball Nora Mørk was holding into a fireball, explod-
ing on impact in the goal. Leaving traces of smoke behind her as she
left the field, roaring with fiery eyes, literally, through digital remastering.
The game commentary, in a high-pitched amazement, booms her other-
worldly talent, “where did that come from? Watch the super heroes on
TV2.”3 The winger Camilla Herrem was given the power of lava “This is
my gift, my curse. Who am I?” the Facebook entry reads, as straight out
of the 2002 Spider-man movie. The team captain, Stine Oftedal, is given
the power of ice and lightning, “Stine is faster than lightning. Lightning
sparks up the arena!” it is said as lightning strikes, the court lights get
dim, and supreme competition is about to begin.
From the 1997 Batman and Robin movie, Schwarzenegger’s character
is brought to life through the women’s team captain. “My name is Stine
‘Ice’. Learn it well, for it’s the chilling sound of your doom.” Stine has
replaced Arnold as TV2’s promos fuse Hollywood’s narrative repertoires
and genres of dramatics in (re)representing the power performances of the
handballgirls. The digital remastering of on-court actions that we find in
promos is not used during the live game depiction. During game play, the
toughness of the women is crystalized through the use of the metaphors
that bring to life the similar images as those the broadcaster can digitally
evoke. This is also where the image of sport war enters:
B: It’s important – in an even match, as this game is likely to be,

[with huge] amounts of warring and battle – that when we fight
our way to a penalty shot, it is of utmost importance to convert.
We have played a heroic match [so far], there’s no doubt about it.
The notion of women’s handball as war is a recurrent theme that is

most often elicited when deciding games are to be played, when two
teams are evenly matched and known for their physical play. As Norway
was about to play Denmark in 2010, TV2 defined the game as war, hav-
ing players and coaches confess to the matter (see page 58 chapter Hand-
ball and Viking warriors). The former Norwegian women’s handball-great
Kjersti Grini, an insider panelist at TV2’s studio, let us know that “It is
going to be all out fighting. The Norwegian girls are going to take a lot
physical punishment and really just shake it off and get up [on their feet]
again and smile.” The newspaper VG interviewed the celebrated captain
of the squad telling us that “Gro Hammerseng – who here [pictured]
almost got tackled out of the European Championship yesterday – sends
out a war cry across Skagerak [the sea separating Norway and Denmark]
– It’s going to be war. Two physically though teams with good defensive
abilities collide. It’s going to be though – says Hammerseng” (Overvik,
2010).
Kjersti Grini lets us know that the Norwegian women are ready for the
physical level one can expect when women sports turn into a war. They
are ready to get banged up, sent to the floor, rattled, shake it off, and
simply just smile back at the opposition. This smile signifies an enjoyment
and immersion in a contact sport in which overcoming physical and men-
tal pains is part of the play. Grini knows what she is talking about. She has
felt it and smiled. Informed Norwegians know she knows; she has tons
of cultural capital. Hammerseng, as well, on the front page of the leading
newspaper VG, applies the notion of sport war. This physical aspect of the
game is not played down by media. Women’s handball is not turned into
a bland version of the men’s game and its player into deviant femininities.
Having mapped a handball code allows us to see that the same generative
grammar guides interpretations of men and women. Those vocabularies
used when depicting men’s sports remain appropriate as women’s hand-
ball is playing with ideas of toughness and war. The comparative method
shows how critical theory generates a gender ambiguity that is not inher-
ent in the handball code, but is shaped by an exogenous force. Indeed, it
is historically true that women athletes showing aggression and courage
were ridiculed by Norwegian journalists that labeled them as unfeminine
(Goksøyr, 2008; Lippe, 2001). Vitally, this, as any other “truth,” was a
performative achievement (Alexander, 2011; Larsen, 2016). Understand-
ing women athletes as unfeminine or ridiculous depends on journalists
and audiences applying a code in which men athletes are marked as nor-
mative and women as deviant, in which toughness is equaled to hege-
monic masculinity. If not, this “truth” looses its power (Table 3.1).
Interviewed by the European Handball Federation, Hammerseng
declares, “I always play the game tough, especially on defense, but always
with a smile on my face. To me, it is an absolute joy to play handball
[…]. But, I can get really furious too” (Moen, 2013). It is this re-fusion
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Table 3.1 A schematic comparison of the empirically informed culture

structuring of handball (the handball code) and the theoretical gender structuring
dominant in critical sport and gender research
Perspective Meaning structuring Gendered structuring
Meaningful Aggressive Passive Aggressive Passive

act Courage Cowardice Courage Cowardice
Sacrifice Selfishness Sacrifice Selfishness
Theoretical Success as Failure as Success as Failure as
conclusion toughness kindness masculine/male feminine/womanly
of smiles and toughness that holds our attention as we continue. As the

live-game commentary resumes, we are invited to a social psychoanalysis
bringing cultural heritage onto the handball court:
A: They are tip-toeing carefully across the yard, the girls in Suzhou.
Doing warm-ups before the second [half]. The score is 15-9 after
the first half. The Norwegian team stormed into an opening 4-0
lead […] overall a pleasing game so far.
The quote above is invested with rich connotations buried deep in

a Norwegian cultural tradition. The powerful female athletes, who are
almost exclusively referred to by their full name, family name, or some-
times nicknames, are as a collective represented as girls. The men team,
dealt with later, are referred to as the handball boys. Critical theorists have
argued that this is an infantilization of adult women (Messner, Duncan,
& Jensen, 1993). It seems more plausible, given the data collected for this
book that we are witnessing a purification of youthhood. I will pursue this
claim later. For now, the emphasis turns to the journalists depicting pow-
erful women athletes, as girls, carefully tiptoeing onto the field—smashing
their opposition in warrior-like ways—smiling to their opposition as they
tremble. Chodorow (1999) holds that gendered meanings are based on
“facts,” fantasies, wishes, and hopes. Fantasy can attain transient verisimil-
itude, a reality of the moment. Crucially, but lost in the English translation
of the quote above, is a shift in accent. The reporter switches to an old-
fashioned Norwegian dialect, paradoxically defined as “new-Norwegian,”
in portraying the girls’ tiptoeing. It awakens the text-image of Arne Gar-
borg (1895/2001) writings, a Norwegian author and poet, republished
again and again, in new-Norwegian. It is the children’s song “Småsporven
gjeng i tunet” [Tiny sparrows wander the yard] that has entered the sports
arena in Suzhou:
Tiny sparrows wander the yard, nibble grains and pluck straws
in a pleasant mood and laughing at the gray cat.
Pip, pip, that’s how days pass by
The cat-man Mons chases me, but can never fetch me.
The analogy, consciously or unconsciously used by the commentators,

carves out a space for handball girls and sparrows. They are both light-
footed, light-minded, and playfully avoiding the opposition’s attack. The
new-Norwegian word “tippar,” meaning nibble, has been replaced by
“trippar,” meaning tiptoeing, both connoting gentle, precise movements.
Fused in performance, is a playful, youthful tease with the danger repre-
sented to the sparrows by the “cat-man” named Mons and to the hand-
ballers by the opposing team. Like the feeling a kid can get from being
chased and chased again by the adult figure, screaming in joy, “you cannot
catch me,” the anticipation of a chase is reimagined in the aesthetics of the
game. While this is a play with our ideas of material size and power, the
psychoanalyst of Norwegian fairy tales and myths, Hermundstad (1995),
reveals another aspect. He argues that the bird is associative of the air and
of femininity. Remember Føya’s feathered cloak, one of her most prized
possessions. Far from stripped of power, the cloak gives a falcon shape
and ability to fly (Gaiman, 2017). Hermundstad opens up a gateway for
rereading the journalist’s analysis in seeing how a team of sparrows go
about their youthful play with the old and gray cat-man Mons. How he
rediscovers that the women athlete retains the energy of youthhood and
that the smallest girl among us can prevail in the world of epic com-
petition—if only the opposition is outsmarted by paying attention to the
seemingly trivial detail that interrupts or restores cosmic equilibrium. Two
stories are fusing. One of the energy of youth. One of women’s power.
We have already met with the ideal of a not too kind Viking woman of
the past but also current Norwegian women-politicians are saluted as they
take on and outsmart non-civil and patriarchal adversaries (Broch & Skille,
2018). This deep-rooted narrative is arguably part of an iconic conscious-
ness elicited to make sense of and idealize women’s power in Norway.
In the eyes of the journalists, Norwegian women excel at managing the
game script and a set of ideals about youth and power that transcends
time. Perhaps the potential transition to gender equality does not entail
90 T. B. BROCH
an abandonment of tradition. Most importantly, tradition is not cutting

the handballgirls short of agency, smarts and vigor in competition. Infan-
tilization is not simply a means of stripping an adults’ power. None of the
fragments appears to constitute “matter out of place,” but rather pearls
on a neckless string. There seems to be alignment here between form and
function, a seamless beading of smarts, morals, and force:
A: Stange stays down. Only a yellow card is given to line player Sha
[Chinese player].
B: Couldn’t argue if she got more than a yellow card [for that infrac-
tion]. Stange is tough, initiating our offense upon arrival on the
attack, and during our transition game.
A: Stange smiles and laughs – all teeth intact.
B: Almost everyone who has played for Norway has contributed.
[They] stand solid on the defense, smiling and laughing much more
now.
B: [I] want more tempo […] we need to push the tempo […] we
must up our defensive intensity.
A: Yes, the Icelander [Norwegian coach], with lots of experience
from Norwegian handball, wanted back the smile too. They have
melted many handball hearts [spectators] through the month of
December with their smiles, the handball girls. It is important to
increase the happiness too, the joyfulness of the game. [It] Betters
the performance.
A: Yes, Katrine Lunde-Haraldsen makes the save and here comes
the pass downfield to Linn-Kristin Riegelhuth – Brilliant! Brilliant!
That’s our girls the way we know them!
The toughness and energy of youth, an affirmation of an active and,

indeed, ideal young womanhood, materializes as the girls. This is “the
way we know them!” Tine Stange gets punched right in the mouth,
smiles, and laughs. She puts corporal toughness on the stage. She shows
us that she is tough. The journalist verbalizes her corporal message to
the audience. A smile is also encouraged by the present head coach of
the national women’s team, the Icelander, who wants its cultural force
evoked. Indeed, a smile is a powerful means to mask emotions and to
energetically display and “contaminate” others with its assumed positive
effect (Hochschild, 2012). During fieldwork in youth handball, journal-
ist Mette Bugge (2011) of Aftenposten reported on the handballgirls in
trying to get at how and why the women have become so immensely pop-
ular. She asked the “girls” why they are Norway’s most popular national
team and they answered, “We are affable and enthusiastic. The players
are good at showing off sports joy [idrettsglede] and commitment.” This
is contagious, they all agreed. “Everything goes easier when in a good
mood.” Success makes the presentation of joy a lot easier, the handball-
girls did admit. To reek of success, even in disarray, also has pragmatic
benefits. “This is something we are very conscious of. We work on it
all the time and we know it has an effect on opposing players as well.”
It is as if they are all assisting each other to find the right note of the
handball tune—as if, they are reaching for the high pitch of iconic flow.
The romantics of it all still has a very realist and pragmatic slant. “The
strategy is that the opponent never knows if [our] players are worried or
disappointed. We know that body language has an enormous effect,” adds
the, the Icelander, weighing in on the realism of performance. Journalist
Bugge writes that the Icelander was amazed by the happiness and joy he
saw when the Norwegian women’s team won the 1986 World Champi-
onship bronze medal to make their decisive international breakthrough.
“Ever since, it has been part of our culture. Through the years, all our
players have had a sparkle [glimt ] in the eye, a smile readily available,
and padded each other on the shoulders,” he explains. Within the loosely
scripted logics of the handball game, the smile has enchanted potentials as
it links current actions to a victorious past. As it encloses toughness in the
iconic shape of the affable and youthful handballgirl. The active woman
body ignites the sparks that make cold Norwegian winter-hearts melt with
enthusiasm for their national darlings. This act of youthful energy, on a
journey of obstacles, is decorated with mascara and foundation, ponytails,
and hairpins:
B: There’s Malm Frafjord!

A: We are back! A very strong move by Marit Malm Frafjord – busts
a hairpin too, but it’s back in place now.
B: Gets a replacement [pin]. What I think is great, is that we have
made some fine attacks. We’ve have improved our tempo […] we
have thrust in our legs, brilliant.
While the femininities are diverse, their teamwork indeed conforms to

a visual presentation of a young Norwegian gender-identity that gives the
smile an appearance of a feminine truth. The alchemy of smiles, ponytails,
92 T. B. BROCH
mascara, and nail polish adorn the handball warrior’s materiality. A non
“apologetic” woman athlete as tough as can be. Toughness is not used
by the journalists to reduce the handballgirls’ success to that of being a
man. The journalists do not mask the handballgirls’ feminine inabilities or
make them into gender-neutral athletes to be able to appreciate their per-
formance—making the athletes out to no longer be women because they
are not powerless.4 There is, all the same something peculiarly gendered
with the fusion of the smile and the corporal materiality of the hand-
ballgirl . The journalists’ iconic consciousness, what directs their analysis
of the act of toughness and the materiality of the women athlete, is a
deep-rooted significance of biological women’s power in competition:
A: We cannot [risk] playing on such small margins. As long as we

are ahead by five goals: We need to take care of the ball as if it was
a newborn child.
Nothing is more naturalizing of gender difference, from a gender per-

spective, than bringing reproductive distinctions between sexed bodies
into social processes (Connell, 2002, p. 10). Nothing is more vital to the
creation of hegemonic masculinity, for sport sociologists, than the ath-
letic sacrifice (Messner, 1994; Trujillo, 1995). Yet, this journalist does
not seem to devalue women in the field of competition and on the public
stage of accomplishment and recognition. In his hermeneutic effort, the
journalist re-fuses women biology, myths about her inclination to sacri-
fice, with the toughness he thinks are necessary to win the game. This
is a process in which it is hard, perhaps pointless, to distinguish between
corporal materiality and meaning. In concert, the woman’s body is drawn
into social processes in which it is not subordinated, marked as deviant
and unable. The woman’s body and its prospect of physical prowess is
marked as normative, able, and its power is naturalized. Not as male
power, but as biological women’s power.
In the opening game of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio,
the live-game commentary cheered the Norwegian wing-player Linn-
Kristin Riegelhuth as “she is back from her maternal leave and battles
[kriger/warring] the ball into the net.” The hard-hitting Heidi Løke,
reported from the field saying she “got a knee right in one of the ovaries.
It hurt” (Lie & Smith, 2016). Later she amazed the Norwegian press as
she was back exercising only six days after she gave birth to her son Oscar.
“That is just how Heidi is. She does not like so sit still. She is a machine
that continues to impress me,” said her handballgirl-colleague Camilla

Herrem (Ertesvåg & Rowlands, 2017). Like the woman fighting for her
child’s life, returning to action after the strain of birth is thought to be
heroic, powerful, and impressive. Almost to the point of madness. Like
that of a Norse god or athlete laughing herself of the horn on her fore-
head. These references to biology naturalize heterosexual motherhood
in ways which meanings of biology, sex, and youth, become sources for
admiration and real social power.
Eventually, these young women heroes end their careers. In 2017,
one of the most accomplished handballgirls, for long outed lesbian, Gro
Hammerseng-Edin, retired. Several media mourned the loss of her iconic
presence, but were confident that her persona persists in narrative. After
marrying and having a son with her teammate Anja Hammerseng-Edin,
the self-proclaimed feminist wanted to speak LGBT rights, human right,
and help women who enter male-dominated roles (Hoel & Mueller,
2017). You will never get a better role model, said journalist Welhaven
(2017) of VG. She is not only an all-time great handballer but also has
fought for “the right to be who you are, and be with who you want to.
Heroes like that take the lead. They are priceless for youth struggling with
their identities.” Welhaven does not lionize Hammerseng for reproduc-
ing sport hierarchies and social inequality through acts of sport tough-
ness. She is iconized as his performances fuse her on-court fights with
off-court believes in democracy. These landscapes of meaning are natu-
ralized as they materialize in the cast of women’s bodies. “There is some-
thing iconic over their posthumous,” Welhaven generalizes and asserts
that handballgirls are “extraordinary athletes and personas, in more ways
than being great athletes.” They are icons because of how their actions
subsume broad culture and feed back into it. Because journalists fuse their
on-field bravery with a striving for excellence in social sacrifice and justice.
As social performance, the handball contest is not only recreating hierar-
chies but also social fights for solidarity. Gro Hammerseng-Edin allows us
to see feminism, the empirical working of the gender perspective, in her
own story of past triumphs, wishes for humanity and the possible quests
that lies ahead. Journalists and athletes work to help audiences to identify
with what they believe can be social life changed for the better. These
are small pieces to the huge gains from and continual power of feminism,
often circumvented by critical scholars. Indeed, the institutional function-
ing of sports, its goals and goods, are not in itself generating justice. Yet,
its actions are relentlessly translated and criticized with the grammar of
94 T. B. BROCH
civility and justice (Alexander, 2006, 2015). When sports intersect with
the civil sphere through performances like this, it becomes crystal clear
that sport is not just childish play or a meaningless commercial ritual.
As a means of reflecting on social life, sports are also about the totems of
our cultures, the objects that represent societies, what they mean and who
is allowed to gather around them. Vertical sport hierarchies are translated
into the horizon of solidarity and civility. As a cultural phenomenon, sport
can make us reflect on and work toward solidarity despite of widespread
social inequality.
The sport sociological thesis of an absolute reproduction of male power
in society, upheld through all sports at all times, should thus remain an
empirical question. Alexander (2007) argues that while culture structures
are relatively stable, the icons that condense a meaning system are much
more dynamic. Purity and danger are not necessarily biologically fixed
to the icon’s sex, but varies in the cultural historical contexts that define
our solidarities and discords. In Norwegian handball, the female body
has long materialized the first sex, the norm of purity that defines game
excellence. We will soon see that Norwegian handball can be seen as a
man’s game when male bodies take the court, but that this is an attempt
at fusion that has only achieved a transient verisimilitude. Of the top five
programs of Norwegian TV2, all time, regardless of genre, the women’s
team holds positions 2, 3, and 4. In the festive year of 2014, with broad-
casts from the Sochi Olympics and the Rio World Cup in soccer, the
handballgirls ran off with the second most viewed broadcast, only beaten
by the men’s cross-country skiing relay (Brakstad, 2014). The national
women’s cross-country team skier Marit Bjørgen has been one of Nor-
way’s most popular athletes for years (Fossbakken, 2014). This concert
of women’s toughness and journalistic appraisal has long had significant
success in Norway. As the handballgirls’ lost to Russia in the 2007 World
Cup final, Sæther reminded Norwegians how spoiled they had become
after 20 years of nonstop success. To anyone who scowled, he declared
that “the handballgirls deserve an eternal safeguard” (Sæther, 2007). The
handballgirls’ triumphs, he alluded, are of national interest because of
their iconic representation of gender equality. This counts for our soccer
women as well, he said. While the “soccergirls” have not been equally
successful, they have broken even harder barriers on their path. “The
courage of being pioneers offers power,” he asserts. A democratic and
solidary power that is relational to our past (Hilmar, 2016). Two stories
run parallel here. One of institutional barriers. One of social injustice. As
icons, the women athletes of our time have bravely broken barriers in
both spheres. Many remain. We still need them. They can offer us some-
thing in return. Within the pioneer resides a toughness that is important
to keep for the struggles of the moment and for those of our future. It is
“worthy of an eternal safeguard.” The handballgirl’s enchantment snaps
competitive game-surface into alignment with a deep play of our moral
and existential questions the democratic project.
It has not been my argument that Norwegian male and female ath-
letes are equal in all contexts or that all Norwegians value men’s and
women’s sports alike. There are differences and inequalities that need
to be debated and properly handled still. However, handball—a women-
dominated sport in a country that makes it a point of honor to place
gender equality at its basis of democracy—drives us to open up an ana-
lytic space for embracing the ambivalence of democracy and competition.
In meaningful sports, national identity, civil translation, and gender inter-
sect to make its theatre a stage for politics, moral, and existential debates.
In this book, national culture makes the handballgirl Norwegian in color.
Yet, this national shimmering should not blind us. Its twists and turns are
simply presenting us with a negative instance. It tempts us to reverse the
neo-Marxist thesis in the sociology of gender and sports. Sport cultures
do not only disguise gender equality by naturalizing inequality. Sports
can mask gender inequality by naturalizing equality.5 This is important.
It shows how meaningful sport can shape gender. Ask any Norwegian
handballboy, he can tell you it is true.
The Second Sex of Norwegian Handball: Playing

Catch-up?
With a young and renewed roster, the handballboys managed to climb
to a number 4 position in the 2016 European Cup. Entering into the
2017 World Cup, TV2 sized the opportunity to once more renew our
hope in the team that had been commonly dubbed “the almost team”
[nestenlaget ] for their repeated failures in the deciding seconds of impor-
tant games. As the prospect of making it into the 2017 semifinals dawned,
the commentators declared that “this is what is takes to generate a culture
of success. By repeating the feat of last year’s European Cup. The boys
are young. They are the future. They are the ones who have to build an
96 T. B. BROCH
achievement culture. Then, perhaps, we may join in another handball-

fairytale, like the one the handballgirls have provided us for more than
30 years.”
The handballboys won and won again. In battling Makedonia, the
boy’s head coach, Christian Berge, was asked what he told the boys before
going into the game: “Just go out there and have a really good time again
[kose oss igjen]. That is what it is all about. We play handball because we
enjoy it.” TV2 commentators recall, “that for 20 years, they (the team)
have frustrated us much more than they have brought us joy. Now they
have charmed us to death. They have impressed us and brought us joy.
They have broken barriers.” Yet in the game, barriers, or perhaps spring-
boards, are present as one of the Norwegian men players is “looking like
Hundvind in her younger days,” one of the all-time greatest wingers on
the women’s team: “Technically schooled, does not need much room [to
succeed].” Panelist in the studio, former handballgirl, Randi Gusta praises
the boys for their high level of energy saying the boys are more well-
rounded today than before. They toned down their “testosterone roars”
to show “tons of joy.” The captain of the boys’ team, Bjarte Myrhol is
applauded too. “What is he doing that makes the boys respond and per-
form so well,” they ask. Randi Gusta knows, “I believe that it is all about
awareness, seeing your teammates. Being a captain who has the ability to
care [for others], both on and off the field. We hear it during the timeouts
and we see it demonstrated on the court. You can say many things, but
if you do not [show us that you] mean it through bodily actions, then
forget it. Myrhol dives for the loose ball, he takes the lead. Incredible
guy.” The boys’ new and critically acclaimed recipe for success takes them
all the way to the final, facing off against the highly accomplished French
team in Paris. The team captain of the handballgirls, Stine Oftedal, is at
the arena and the reporters ask her how she presumes the boys are feel-
ing, being that “you have, after all, actually played a World Cup final.”
Other media reports on “the handballgirls best advice to the boy’s grand
finale,” asking former handballgirl-greats for advice (Thelen, Fløttum, &
Bryne, 2017). The boys’ strategy for success, taking care of each other,
performing sport joy, resounds the narrative of the iconic head coach of
handballgirls, Marit Breivik. Breivik epitomized the women’s movement
of the 1970s. In entering the male realm of sport, she showed us that suc-
cess is not reliant on being an authoritative man that disregards his play-
ers’ wishes and threatens them to perform. Underlining teamwork and
democracy as communication-strategy, revered historian Slagstad (2010)
names Breivik’s coaching style as a form of democratic leadership. She

reschooled potential players, breaking their habitual practices of passiv-
ity to authoritative and hierarchal coaching regimes. Instead, she built a
more democratic and inclusive collective. Not to mistake, this regime was
not too kind, but tough in making the athletes responsible by taking part
in decision-making (Hemmestad, 2013). As the handballboys were wait-
ing to take the court and play their first international final, they were in
the iconic presence of the handballgirls that had defined their game. This
reality was not only pressing on the sidelines. It had formed their very
game play.
For long, the boys’ minority position within the Norwegian hand-
ball federation and their poor international results provided scarce media
attention, limited sponsor interest, and poor economic capital. After their
decisive breakthrough in 2017, with a World cup silver, the handball-
boys refused to resign their contracts. They demanded “the same salary
contracts as the women. For the first time in many years, we finally had
some leverage,” the boys’ captain Myrhold recapitulated the negotiations,
laughing kindly (Herrebrøden & Christiansen, 2018). There seems to be
little doubt that in Norway the handball boys are the second sex of their
sport. Should I perhaps then go looking for gender differences and place
them in a hierarchy in which women are marked as normative and men
are marked as deviant and unable? Tempting as it might be, this might
mask how journalists and sport actors themselves perform criticism and
how fairly consistent binaries of sacred and profane direct a multitude of
representations. Norwegian handball can be seen as a man’s game when
practiced by men bodies. We need to take another dive into the social psy-
choanalysis, now of men handball in Norway, to understand what makes
it so. We need to give the code of though | kind equal explanatory value
as in the analyses of women’s handball. How are notions of toughness
shaping and being shaped by the corporal presence of men bodies? How
does the hopes of joining the company of greats and the fears of falling
down among those much, much smaller (see p. 57) shape Norwegian
men’s international handball quests?
A: … we are only seconds away from the titanic clash, the battle of
Scandinavia, here in Ostseehalle in Kiel. It’s be or not to be, for one
of the two Scandinavian countries. This is going to be a game for
grown men.
B: That’s correct.
98 T. B. BROCH
When handball games are won, a national team becomes part of the
prestigious elite classified by the metonymic expressions great and large.
The loser is small, trivial, and profane. Studying the Mehinaku of Brazil,
Gregor (1977, p. 276) looked into gender roles through the prism of
wrestling. He claimed wrestling carved out a stage to single out, give
attention to and admire young boys, paradoxically, by means of parents
yelling at them for not being adult, strong, or courageous. Wrestling abil-
ity was the measure of an adult man with political and private power.
Likened to an anaconda in the quickness of his moves and how he holds
up his opponent, the champion is adored and the looser is yelled at for
being a fool, to keep his face off the dirt (Gregor, 1985, p. 96). Sports
is a stage for criticism where youth can symbolically grow by joining the
athletic and the social act. Indeed, many of our elite sports do gather the
largest and still motorically skilled bodies of our societies (Epstein, 2013).
While evaluations of the corporal size of women handballers do occur and
then, at times, mark height and weight as a problematic issue for the girls’
self-image.6 The large male body fascinates journalists (Jorem, 2017) in
what seems to be an unproblematic way. This is not so, we shall see when
entering the youth sports arena. Yet, in the media, while youthful energy
is highly valued for both men and women, size and growth signifies a
parting from childhood to adulthood. The journalists enthusiastically re-
fuse manhood and game play as earlier match sequences are analyzed:
2: For France, Didier Dinar, who here lifts [and throws] Johnny
Jensen out-of-the-way. Johnny is no small boy. Dinar only plays
defense for the French team: 197 [cm] tall, 104 kilos, and maybe
the best defensive player in the world. [Dinar] Picks up Johnny
Jensen, as if he was a small boy, and just tosses him aside.
1: It wasn’t Jenny Jensen we just saw, it was Johnny.
Johnny is no small boy and surely no woman (Jenny), he is a man

fighting for a dominant position on the floor—and so is his rival. The
discursive cannot be detached from this visual actuality of sports. The
materiality of bodies evokes the journalist fusion of size and toughness
as masculinities. “True” masculinity is often tied down to male bodies
(Connell, 2005, p. 45). However, it is the meaning-making process that
is interesting, seeking out explanations as to what is shaping gendered
perceptions of sacred and profane bodies. Picking up and tossing Johnny
Jensen to the side is a visual testimony to Dinar’s strength. Reminiscent
and, perhaps, best explained by myth in which boys claim or reclaim their
manhood in quest. On the sport theatre, the material body is turned into
an artifact that transcends from the narrative of game play into the nar-
rative of gender. The handball code of toughness, that made girls into
women protectors of the sacred child, makes the rookie become veteran
and turns the boy into man:
B: Løke [Norwegian player] is remarkably strong. Rastvortsev [Rus-

sian] stands there and tries to pin him down. He [Rastvortsev] is
not a little boy [but he cannot hold Løke]
A: Using Løke on defence now. That would not have been possible
a couple of years ago. He was like a practice cone [easy to pass].
Now he has grown.
Whether Løke has grown mentally, physically, or has aged, is not the
issue. He has grown into a role in which he fights off large and tall, mus-
cular and heavy Russian men, and where he can hold his ground defen-
sively on the quest for a championship medal. Sports are transitional per-
formatives in the form of corporal game rhythms. Success in being tough
allows actors to be seen as playing with materiality and meaning, shaping
their corporal identities in stride. Their athletic bodies hold the power
to keep some of the youthful energy and, at the same time reach for
adulthood. This deep play is not static, but an ongoing meaning-making
allowing the corporal objects to answer the moral and existential ques-
tion of our time. Like in the Mahinaku’s wrestling competitions, deep
play joins focused game attention with the social criticism of the audience.
Play turns serious and with consequence. If not, there is no enchantment.
Not only the athlete’s success or loss adorns or strips him of his cultural
fabric. His capacity to carry social and moral forces is what primes the
actor and audience in evaluative concert.7 The consequences of his act,
as is the case when the women are playing, are felt by those who identify
with the performer. The team becomes we, us, the nation.
B: Why can’t we make the substitutions as fast as we should? They

[the opposition] strike like lightning [and score]. […]
A: Yes, well, we are shorthanded and still have to make the sub-
stitutions. So we are in an incredibly vulnerable situation. We are
standing buck-naked, without a thread, in the middle of the city
centre! It’s not easy!
100 T. B. BROCH
Being stripped naked by the opposition is a visual proof in narrative

form of how an object of the gaze is objectified, humiliated, and shamed
(Berger, 1972). It is also an active performative. The boys are undressed,
for all to feel. We can almost touch the team’s humiliation and discomfort.
It becomes our own. The athlete has been too kind. It is really just silly.
Right there, in the limelight where the tension between pride and shame
is most graphic. Paradoxically, there might be nothing more masculine
than the naked male body and it may thus be displayed with much pride.
This uncertainty adds to the unstable outcome of the scripted game. It
catalyzes the significance of performative choices and the moral character
of actors. Brilliance is in the narrative eye of the beholder. The purity
of an action results from how its tone feeds into the musicality of the
quest. The journalists’ hold the hermeneutic power to strip and adorn
male bodies of respectable Norwegian masculinity:
A: Nicely defended on the Russian fast break. Yes, Thomas [Norwe-

gian player] doesn’t stand around with his hat in hand debuting in
the European Cup.
B: Why should he. Fast as a lightning and stands tall in the duel.
(…)
A: (…) He’s brilliant on the fast break. Welcome to the team
Thomas!
A: Andre Jørgensen [Norwegian player] is set up [to score]; on
ground, at sea, and in air as well! Just like Espen Askeladd.
“No, no, boy. This must end. Do not scurry into the living room,
before you have taken off your hat. Did you forget? That’s not nice”—
goes the old, but renowned Norwegian edification song from 1907 by
Margrethe Munthe (1907/2002). The lyrics tell us how young men and
boys should perform reverence by quietly taking off their hat and by
respecting their elders. Thomas, the rookie, is no longer a shy boy who
stands timid and passive, hat in his hand, respectfully waiting for the adults
to respond and command. Thomas takes charge, is not too nice, but fast
and powerful like lightning. His act on the handball court is in rever-
ence to the handball code. For this, he is praised, welcomed to the team
and the materialization of toughness that comes with it. Andre Jørgensen,
another youngster is likened to the mythical fairytale figure Espen Aske-
ladd. The fairytales about Espen Askeladd are all narratives of a boy on his
way to becoming a man. On his quest for merits, away from the warmth
of his mother’s cooking in the open fireplace (hence the name Askelad-
den—Aske = Ash) he meets many obstacles and battles huge, aggressive
trolls, much like the handball boys have to. Askeladden is no patriarch
likened to those in at the apex of Connell’s (1987, 2005) gender order.
Askeladden has a curious boyish smart. Like most other children, that has
not yet been taught proper manners, he picks up and sees the value of
things that an adult eye would deem to be trash. Whomever he meets on
his way, no matter how weird, old or ragged they may seem, like the old
and poor women with her nose stuck in a tree stump, he remains curious
and kind. Unlike his selfish and arrogant brothers who think too highly
of themselves and do not care for others, the Ashlad kindly talks with
and shares his meager goods with the people that his brothers bypassed.
His kindness grants him magical gifts and abilities, like the building of
a ship that can sail equally well at sea, on land, and through air. Just
like Andre Jørgensen setting sails on the handball court. Eventually, the
Ashlad’s kind and clever attitude earn him the tools and companions to
make a team fit to earn the ultimate prize: his manhood, the princess,
and half the kingdom. These are cultural clues from our deep-rooted
fairytales and edification songs. Thomas and Margrethe Munthe’s boy,
hat in hand, Andre and Askeladden on their quests, are striving toward
respectable adulthood. The Ashlad, uses his childish attentiveness and car-
ing for others, to get there. Be not fooled. This does not mean that only
women handballers have to be though and duel with their foes. The Ash-
lad battles trolls and the handballboys have to master the sport war. As
the lonesome penalty shooter steps up to the penalty mark, the goalie is
his only rival and last obstacle. Standing about four to seven meters apart,
they face off in an intense battle of minds and skills. With five and a half
minutes remaining in the decisive game between Denmark and Norway,
the referee once more points to the penalty mark:
A: Strand [the Norwegian player] looks over his shoulder [at the
coach], and gets the signal, he will shoot the penalty. It is five
and a half minute left, in the game in which Norway will do just
fine with a draw. We can level the score right now. If only Strand
outsmarts Hvidt, the Danish captain [and goalie]. It is a duel, like
the ones on dusty roads in the old and Wild West. Strand vs. Hvidt.
A bang goes off from Strand! Strand wins the duel !
102 T. B. BROCH
“We are not going to present a game analysis during half time; we
are going to do a movie critique – of a Western.” The color commen-
tator proclaims in exuberance. “Jepp, Festus is right around the corner
with his coffee mug. Because it does not only smell like, it certainly looks
like Gunsmoke right now.” “Yes,” the expert commentator answers, “this
is, this is like a Western.” In this Norwegian Western, Kjetil Strand has
swapped place with Festus. The ball has taken the role of the six-shooter.
Bridging the Atlantic cleft is a scripted play sharing by imitation a set of
formal and informal rules. No shooting in the face or in the back of your
opponent. Like the drama of the Western genre that these journalists per-
haps grew up with, the handball game is “fun,” “it is intense” and stirs up
“lots of feelings,” they say. Analogies like these, when chosen, arise from
and touch grounds in the meaningful landscapes of the situation (Berkaak
& Frønes, 2005). As the gunsmoke fumes to the sounds of courage and
chance, the journalists dig into their toolkits of local and global narratives
of toughness:
A: Metlecic [Croatian], looks like he’s been to war. He has ban-

dages and patches all over his face. The Croatians kind of look like
Napoleon’s men retreating from the east front back in them days.
A: I have not seen anything like this since my compulsory military
service [førstegangstjeneste] and my days as a recruit at Sessvoll-
moen [military base in Norway].
B: There has been shooting, shooting and shooting. Hagen [the
Norwegian player] has shot the Russians off the court.
Today, a couple of years after these games, both young men and
women are by a law called for initial compulsory military service in Nor-
way. Indeed, very few women or men actually attend and complete their
service. Still, this “gender neutral” progression in the military serves deep
political interests. “In a modern Norway there should be equal rights
and duties for both genders. The military should mirror our society.”8
Norwegian politicians, at least in legitimizing a “gender neutral” military
claim that broad social justice should be mirrored in unequal military cul-
tures. Viewed from the critical gender perspective, the politicians sound
progressive and the journalists seem somewhat nostalgic. The journalist
seemingly clings to their childhood and adolescent memories of Gunsmoke
on TV and a military service preserved for men. What happens when new
bodies become meaningful in sport, in new Westerns like Westworld, and
in a Norwegian military no longer exclusively dominated by men? This

is where critical theory, bold and clear, already knows: masculine cultures
recreate male power regardless of the sex of the body that enters and
thrives within these practices. This truth is so seductively sober, so funda-
mental to the sociology of gender that we forget to consider how land-
scapes of meaning other than patriarchal capitalism are read into actions.
How do politicians seek to undo unjust genders? How do journalists crit-
icize patriarchy and glorify sporting acts for equality? Modernity speeds
up the frequency and availability of icons and images (Sonnevend, 2012,
p. 230). Its meanings vary for individuals and societies and their powers
rise and fall in time and space (Alexander, 2012, p. 27). Patriarchal mean-
ing remain powerful but do not exhaust social life. A cultural sociology
of performance asks when and why gendered situations and bodies are
also shaped by codes of solidarity. I have tried to show how an explosion
women and men athletes in sports makes for tough men and women in
society and generates meanings about both men’s and women’s power.
These questions and answers will guide the book’s ethnographic analyses
as well.
The journalists of TV2, who also report on the women’s team, have
repeatedly looked onto the court to see if “Norwegian men’s handball is
going to ignite, or if it’s going to sink back into the ditch it has been in
for all too many years.” They were looking for iconic power, an image
of success that could settle on the men’s bodies. In 2017, they were
tired and enthused by the “almost team” that had “ripped their nerves
to shreds” in one handball drama after another. Far too many games had
been “about the survival of men’s handball.” Her, amid the cold facts of
achievement capital and the subjective moralities of the handball boys, the
journalists found the quest of playing catch-up to the first sex of Norwe-
gian handball. Not only as the handballboys negotiated their contracts,
but as they maneuvered the symbolic space of a meaningful sport that in
Norway had long settled on the body of women athletes. Indeed, despite
this cultural fact, the materiality of men bodies evokes a different inter-
pretation of men than of women. This is a transient state of meaning that
is contingent on performances where the journalists might have felt the
need to overcompensate due to the men’s secondary act.
A: I understand now why they call men’s handball the fight sport
with a ball. There are tackles all over.
104 T. B. BROCH
B: This is how we need to play. We must hold our ground. We must

fight and battle (wage war/‘krige’)
B: It is all about reaching that level (of playing) and to win the
duels, to be willing to absorb the bangs [smellene] that are headed
our way, and that we know are headed our way. We have to hustle
hard.
A: That it was going to be rough, that we knew. So are the women’s
games between Norway and Hungary, and so it is, to an extreme
degree, when the men are playing.
Notably, the media is “selling” sport entertainment and a little bit of

extracurricular and social drama is to be expected. There might even be a
perceived need to differentiate boy from the girl handball, both for spec-
tators and sponsors. TV2 reconstitutes handball, when played by men,
in a new condition, as slightly different than when played by women.
Both women and men fight on the handball court, but men bodies are
bigger and so is their fight. The actual space men bodies occupy on the
court is larger than that of the smaller women bodies. This material real-
ity shapes their gendered games. Men’s handball was dubbed a fight sport
with a ball. Indeed, every now and then, given the meager variations in
the staging of men and women’s handball, a few handball boys and some
journalists have insisted on big gender differences. However, many men
also laugh at these accusations. Former handballboy, long-time coach of
the successful domestic-league women team Larvik and now coach of the
men team Drammen, says he is totally ok with comparing men and wom-
en’s handball. Nevertheless, Gjekstad says the debate is at the moment
dominated by speculating men claiming women’s handball is slow and
less technically advanced. “Not even with a large dose of goodwill and
attempts at objective evaluations can I possibly see that the differences
are as big as many boys want them to be.” Gjekstad admits to TV2
that men are slightly faster and jump slightly higher, but also informs
us that the husband and wife, handballboy and handballgirl Einar Riegel-
huth Koren and Linn-Kristin Riegelhuth Koren, run the 20 meters at the
exact same pace. Taking over as coach for the men team in Drammen, he
says the men players “were not even close to accomplishing the technical
drills that [the women team] Larvik did” (Bakkehaug, 2012). TV2’s own
insider expert and former national women team player Randi Gusta ads
that talking down the girls show signs of a “Stone-age mentality. I am
really done with this debate about quality. Men have said the same thing
for generations. Won nothing. Yawn” (Aarsæther, 2012). True or false,

struggles over meaning in Norwegian sports are alive. And, the bright
aura of the handballgirl is not easily dimmed.
Norwegian handball begs us to rethink the notion of sports as male
preserves in which men and women athletes foremost learn and are eval-
uated in light of masculine and patriarchal values. Overall, the depictions
of women and men are very similar. Women’s and men’s handball is sport
war. Women and men players rise to the test, or grow into it, while
remaining energized by the spirit of a healthy youthhood. Their play
is transitional with sport-joy pulsating through their veins. In Norway,
handballers do not transition into a patriarchy that pollutes their bodies
and risk their sense of justice. In play, women’s toughness is naturalized
and handballgirls transition into womanhood that, in the hopes of jour-
nalists, has and will continue to shape gendered life in more just ways.
The handball boys cannot achieve this worth. They can support it. Many
do. But, it is a prize solely for women. The boys remain entertaining,
captivating, aesthetically pleasing in their own way as they battle trolls on
the court and the social ghost of the girls that have long defined their
game. Like in Norse mythology and the fairytales of the Ashlad, a well-
rounded handball boy is courageous, considerate, attentive to detail, and
clever. Today, the success formula of the national men’s team is chore-
ographed to a tune imitating the handballgirls democratic leadership and
sports joy. While the iconicity of handball girls and boys depend on recur-
rent triumphs in quests of toughness, the enchanted prospect of refusing
power and gender in national-local ways is not only media trickery and
fleeting effervescence. It has implications for corporal moulding, actions
and believes of justice. Claims about the size of men’s and women’s bod-
ies become less of an issue. The hard facts of jumps and speed become
malleable by the soft variables of meaning. Claims about men as better,
tougher, and more advanced, becomes a long yawn goodnight.
Notes
1. Grete Waitz is a Norwegian marathon runner who has won Olympic and
World championship medals as well as nine NYC marathons and two Lon-
don marathons.
2. From the USA (Heywood & Dworkin, 2003), to Qatar (Harkness, Quiroz,
& Gomez, 2018) to Scandinavia (Dahlén, 2008, 2013), narratives of
women athletic power are prevalent in sport media.
106 T. B. BROCH
3. www.facebook.com/GjensidigeNorge/videos/vb.195325250483345/
10155336244312462/?type=2&theater.
4. Research have now coined the term gender-neutral media presentations in
which female athletes are presented as athletes free of gender bias (Capran-
ica & Aversa, 2002; King, 2007; MacKay & Dallaire, 2009).
5. Inspired by Spillman (2012, p. 182) who argues that the language of strate-
gic economic interests can be ideological camouflage for “real” wishes of
sociability.
6. After commenting on the 1.85 cm height and 95 kg heavy Dragana Cvijic
of Serbia’s national women’s team, the journalist apologized, yet added
that, after all, height does make a difference (Askeland, 2013).
7. Alexander joins his theorizing on performance and iconicity to argue that
the material icon projects meaning. “The effects of these signals, their sig-
naling power, cannot be measured […] simply by intentions” alone. It
takes the form of a series of mediations between “projecting meanings and
audience response” (Alexander, 2012, p. 27).
8. A gender equal Norwegian military is not simply legitimized by referenc-
ing gender stereotypes or arguing for equal numbers. It is said that “the
military’s tasks and needs will expand in both breadth and depth, and for
this reason the military will need the very best of humanity. The soldier of
the future must have strengths in legs and heads alike” (Ung.no, 2015).
“Recruiting from the whole population makes for better recruits and more
competition,” says Admiral Elisabeth Natvig who led the Department of
Defense in implementing the Governments new plans (Bentzrød, Winther,
& Karlsen, 2016).
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PART II
Socialization, Sport Felicity and Gender

CHAPTER 4
Throwing Like a Handballgirl: Performance

and Materiality
While broadcasters and sponsors care about the iconic handballgirl and
the narrative of her underachieving boy colleagues, the question remains-
do media sports have any implications for our everyday social life? Enter-
ing into the youth-handball arena, at some distance from the visual iconic-
ity of the handballgirl, we can explore her impact on mundane sport
action. But there is more. While it might be tempting to fall at ease
with believing that sport myth is something produced by the journalist
residing within a money-hungry sport/media-complex, the next chapters
show that the need for myth about chance, fears and hope also remains
important in the everyday of modernity. In Norwegian sport halls, youth
and adults hinge onto the athletic quest and fit out its paths with both
hierarchal and democratic meaning. In Norwegian handball cultures, rid-
ers of the feminist second-wave have taken advantage of sports and sought
to raise their children to do the same (Green, Thurston, Vaage, & Moen,
2015). The iconic handballgirl and her impact on youth sports is, in other
words, shaped by movements in a cultural ecology stretching far wider
than the media.1 I stand to study how the children of the accomplished
waves of feminism are socialized through sports. Here, on the court and
in the bleachers, we get closer to how this meaning-making process has
shaped bodies and skills. We can study the practice side to sports. While
Foucault (1977) would argue that skill acquisition allows us to dismiss
meaning and Bourdieu urges us to dismiss meaning and explore a habi-
tus fusing game structure with social power (Bourdieu, 1990; Wacquant,
2004), I stay on a meaning-centered track to explore a performative feel

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_4
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for the game that allows corporal sensations of social power. It is here, as
the Foucaultians and Bourdieusians glitch, that meaning analysis is helpful
in studying how processes of felicity allow broad culture to shape social-
ization, skills and gendered bodies.
To be a handballgirl you have to be tough. You must learn to “take a
crushing” [tåle en trøkk], it is said. Handball is not a sport for damsels
(H. B. Broch, 1995). The girl handball players in the club I did fieldwork
on did not underplay this element of their sport. Many of them thought
it was fun to fuse institutional and broad culture in challenging their boy
counterparts. As the 15-year-old boy Trym and his team’s volunteer phys-
iotherapist, Trude, were standing together on the sidelines—Trym having
his thumb taped—they are both keeping an eye on the girl’s team of the
same age that is warming up. In a brief break for a drink, one of the girls
stops by to ask Trym “Are you injured?”—“It’s just my thumb, nothing
big, it got banged up during the last training session,” he answers, visibly
enjoying the attention he and his injury are attracting. “What are you? A
crumbly sort of cookie?” asks a girl with a long blond ponytail. He gives
her a weird smile in return but does not answer. Physiotherapist and team-
mom Trude does, in Trym’s defense “Well, you can just come to our next
training session and we’ll see who’s crumbly.” The girl’s team is called on
by their coach, their break is over. Two more girls pass quickly by to
help themselves to some grip raisin before they start up again. “Are you a
crumbly cookie or what? Or are you, what’s it called… a flatbread?” they
ask. Now Trym’s girlfriend comes over too and the boy turns all starry-
eyed. “What are you up to?” she asks him briskly. After all, he has been
getting a lot of attention where he is standing on their sidelines. “Oh,
my thumb just needed some sports tape. Nothing serious.” “You’re not
being a wimp, are you?” she asks, before she runs back onto the court.
Apparently, as Trym is trying to assemble his prior acts in a form held
together by sports tape, the young women pick up his pieces and reassem-
ble them for him. In this jumble of events, individual and shared interests,
a set of contradictory narratives, provide us with an albeit brief insight into
a boy proud of his minor injury. True, he receives attention, but this is
far from being on his own terms. The girls challenge his real need for the
tape. Why does he need it? Is he a cookie that crumbles easily? Is he a thin
slice of flatbread [flatbrød] that offers itself up for breaking? Sport tape
is an artifact, meaning in material form, which can carry connotations of
resilience and toughness. Seemingly, the girls retain the power to define
what the tape signifies. Namely, an object that helps frail boys to stay
4 THROWING LIKE A HANDBALLGIRL: PERFORMANCE AND MATERIALITY 115
in one piece. Surrounded by handballgirls , the only one who takes the
boy’s side is the volunteer physiotherapist and team mom Trude. Trym
has taken the sports tape, lets it attach to his body, to get his meaningful
way with the girls. As when Tor had lost his hammer Mjølner and the thief
troll tries to get his way with Frøya, Tor and the handball boy is playing
dress up. Trude tries to make the girls see the meaning that the handball-
boy Trym aims to project, but she is not a trickster of Loke’s caliber. Or,
the young women are not as easily fooled as was the troll. The story does
not end well, for neither Trym of the Norse myth or of this handball hall.
Tor and the handballgirls retain the artifact of power. But many questions
remain; what generates Norwegian handball girls, with ponytails on their
heads and grip resin on their fingers? What makes handballgirls stronger
than flatbread and tougher than cookies? Why do handballboys break like
thin bread and need protection from their team-moms? Let see how close
to an answer we can get by exploring performative repetition and iconic
flow.
Handballgirls in the Making, Part I: Performances

Shaping Materiality
Children and youth sports in Norway is not part of the school system, as
is the case in North America. Sport is a prominent part of civil society, in
fact, the largest voluntary organization in the country. Here, parents make
up club management and volunteer as coaches with zero or very meager
compensation. The adults partaking in this idealistic “people movement,”
should not be egoistical, but sacrifice to the local community (Archetti,
2003). This is not a straightforward process as parents often bring their
children to sports both to develop their children’s talents and to join in a
social activity that exposes the children to democratic ideals.
Making way through my list of handball clubs to join for a season,
many teams rejected me as they found it might be in conflict with their
high ambitions for success. Youth handball is organized by district and the
better teams can qualify for participation in regional and national cham-
pionships. Depending on the number of teams in the district and region,
there might also be possibilities for bigger clubs to sign up two teams
for series distinguished by skill level. The team that finally welcomed
me contained about 25 young women, 13–14-year old, divided into two
teams. Perhaps telling of sport in Norway, children sports might be the
flagbearer of the idealistic sport movement. The girl team I entered was
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transitioning from children to youth sports and made for a great study.
One woman and one man coached the team. They were in their fifties,
and were assisted by two enthusiastic women of about the same age. The
three women had been training the girls for a while and could present a
united coaching philosophy, inspired by current trends in pedagogy and
the iconic handballgirl-coach Marit Breivik. They tried to keep away from
using the negative word “no” and instead explain why something was
wrong. They laughed wholeheartedly of coaches that screamed at their
players and tried, at times successfully, not to scream themselves. They
loved handball, for providing a social space for a healthy and fun youth-
hood. The team met up for two training sessions during the weekdays,
sometimes for a game as well. There was an extra training session for the
most devoted players on Fridays. During, weekends, time was devoted to
league games and cups. Among an approximate of 590 teams of 13-year
olds in Norway, this team would rate among the top 30.
“Hi. Hi and hi to you too,” assistant coach Mari chuckles to the girls
that are passing by. “Are we really running three laps?” one of the girls
asks, deceptively tired after one 400-meter lap on the outdoor track-and-
field arena. Mari does not answer. The girl simply wanted some attention
and smiles when we look at her before she hurries along to shove some of
her teammates, encouraging them to go faster. Today we are working on
speed and jumps outside in the summer sun before we enter the arena.
I try to catch up with the girls as they gather to do jumping drills. One
of the girls turns around and smiles, asking what I think of their skills.
After all, this is my second training session with them. “I am impressed!”
I tell her. “Yes, we are a very energetic and enthusiastic [sprek] group of
girls.” “Absolutely,” I agree, without being able to pick out what is more
important, skills and acts, joy or team belonging.
There are probably many reasons to why these girls started to play
handball. Being part of the team, the young women were all learning
how to throw like a handballgirl. In the classical piece Throwing like a
girl, Young (1980) uses Beauvoir’s theory of the second sex to show how
patriarchy shapes girls’ bodies, manners of moving and throwing. Girls’
very relation to space differs from boys and men. Particularly so, Young
argues, in the case of body-actions directed at accomplishing goals and
purposes. While Young asserts that there will be many examples of women
and men that do not fit her stereotypical schemas, she holds them even
so, like her sport sociological heirs, to be universal, at least in the Western
world. Not only do girls throw like, well, girls, but women also tend to
see themselves as unable of lifting and carrying heavy things, of pushing

and shoving with significant force, of pulling or grasping with force. Thus,
women frequently fail to summon the full possibilities of their muscularity,
Young argued. While this might be true to the patriarchies from Young
drew her inspiration, we cannot run the risk of assumption. How are
Norwegian girls taught to throw and against what barriers do they push?
“Has everybody put on warm clothes? It is not like we have to make
you a list?” Bjørn wonders. “That’s a cute headband, Camilla!” Bjørn fid-
dles the little ribbon on her pink headband. “Bjørn wants one for Christ-
mas, you are just jealous,” coach Katrine laughs. We step outside. There
are about 10 centimeters of snow and it is getting colder. “We do not
jog outside if the temperature drops below 15 C negative,” Bjørn tells
me as we are off into the woods. Bjørn takes the lead and directs me
to keep an eye on the long line of girls jogging through the dimly lit
forest path. The Women World Cup has just started and the girls are dis-
cussing the last game. “Why do you think Løke gets so little play-time,”
I ask. “I think they believe that Frajord is the better defensive player,”
answers Mette who quickly turns the talk around, “I think Camilla Her-
rem is so awesome!” her voice is full of admiration, “She just jumps, tricks
and curves the ball – she is just amazing.” “Trygve!” Monika yells at me,
“you have to come jog with us in the back! It’s kind of spooky when it’s
so dark.” We soon leave the woods and jog into a residential area and
then back to the arena where Bjørn has measured up an about 40 meters
racetrack on the soccer turf. We are doing 10 runs, 75% effort. Bjørn
claps his hands and we are off. “Where did you go Trygve? You kind of
disappeared,” Vilde dramatically wonders as she beats me to the finish
line. “Oh, are we racing?” I ask. She looks at me as if I am the dumbest
person in the world. Bjørn’s voice thunders across the field “Hey, June,
you are cheating! You are supposed to run in the snow!” Bjørn laughs
as some of the girls have found a narrow passage that has been cleared.
“My toes are getting cold,” June quietly tells her partners in crime. All
the girls fall back into the line, and into the snow. Bjørn claps and we are
now racing. Several of the girls join in. Not by a long shot is Vilde or
the other girls going to let me win. “Is that really 75 percent,” I ask after
another loss. “Off course it is”—“Well, I guess I have to bring it up to
about 80 percent then,” I laugh. As I turn around, I feel the cold of snow
hitting me in the back of my head before it slowly starts running down
my neck and under my wool-shirt. The warm up has turned to one part
snowball fight and one part sprints. Another lap and “Hey! You got me
118 T. B. BROCH
right in the forehead”—“Yes, it was a really good throw!” Vilde answers

me in her most precocious [veslevoksen] way. “I totally agree,” as I wipe
my face of snow. “I was on target at school today too,” she explains with
utmost shamelessness—“I hit a couple of boys right in the face, so”—so,
I am not her first victim.
We move indoors. Handball players always warm up their arms.
Throwing in pairs. Afterwards, it is time for shots at the goalie, so she
too gets nice and warm and used to the ball hitting her body. Today
we are working on shooting technique. I run off to get two large foam-
mattresses. One I keep myself, hold up into the air—so the girls have an
imagined wall they have to shoot over. Bjørn clarifies the drill: “It is all
about attitude girls. You cannot bend your knees and look down. You
have to keep a straight back and let the shot run all the way through
your body!” Bjørn also shows us how it should not be done, to every-
one’s humorous enjoyment, and how it should be done. He is an expert
in using stereotyped body language. The girls take turn in catching the
ball, in motion. With a maximum of three steps, trying not to lose speed,
but elevate and extend their arm so they can shoot over the mattress. Eli
shoots, scores, and has to retrieve the ball herself before getting back in
line. She looks over her shoulder and sees that Mia is picking up speed.
“Oooh now, not Mia!” Eli stresses into the goal net to retrieve her ball
and avoid Mia’s shot. “What’s the matter? She doesn’t shoot that hard”
the goalie Tina shrugs her shoulders and levels her feet to prepare. Mia
takes the shot, but Tina makes the save, “You see,” Tina smiles to her
teammate that is still scrambling to get the ball out the net. “Awesome
save,” I cheer Tina. Also Mia gives her a high five, finally picks up her ball
and flees the scene. The practice session ends with game simulation. The
coaches take the sideline and discuss how to best teach the girls to keep
their arms high when shooting. “There, look at Cecilia, she just shoves
the ball.” I ask Bjørn, who has coached boys and girls, if there is any dif-
ference in shooting skills and strength. As he tells us that boys are often
stronger in their upper bodies, Mia sends another shot, a real rocket-shot
towards the goal. We all smile. Her mother, and coach, Katrine, just rolls
her eyes. “Mia has got a canon, just like her mother. She too had a vis-
cously hard shot,” Bjørn tells us—“No wonder,” I reply, “as she forces her
three daughters to chop wood at their cabin every holiday.” We laugh as
Bjørn does his best lumberjack impression, carrying wood on his shoulder
and flexing his biceps “Oh, yeah!” he says, “That will make you strong!”
Sports challenge children, youth, and adults in interpretation, to make
meaning of and guide corporal movements and team moral. Coaches and
athletes are interpretive performers.
Not all the girls on this team went lumberjacking throughout the sum-
mer and shot as hard as Mia. Not all of them had inherited the powerful
shooting genes of their mothers. A little under halfway through the sea-
son, Cecilia might fit neatly into Young’s typology of throwing like a girl.
Yet, by springtime, also Cecilia extended her arm to the great joy of her
coaches. While she was struggling with mastering the shot though, Cecilia
was regularly praised for her aerobic capacity. Given that she also partic-
ipated in cross-country skiing, renowned for its element of endurance,
every time Cecilia out-hustled her teammates the coaches nodded in
agreement—this girl has got an amazing motor. Cecilia’s motor and the
meaningful throw of a handballgirl seems different from what Young and
today’s scholars (Cooky, 2006; Wensing & Bruce, 2003) document as
female inabilities, patriarchies, and cultures of restrains. It does not resem-
ble the meaning system of the anorexic Barbie icon that enters Mess-
ners (2002) study of children’s sports in the USA. During my study, I
worked with girls and boys alike to extend their arms and to rotate their
upper body and hips in generating throwing force. This specialized force
is shaped by the handball game and came in handy in the schoolyard,
in case a snowball fight erupts. Yet, handball is not simply about throw-
ing. Nor was Young’s study. Throwing is only a corporal prism of cul-
tural experience. Young (1980, pp. 143–144) argued that women often
approach a physical engagement with materiality in timid, uncertain, and
hesitant ways. Not trusting in their bodies to carry out aims as they are
overwhelmed by fears of getting hurt. A fear that is greater in women than
men. Yet, the boys and girls I met were all working on not being afraid.
In the Media, journalists purified and polluted women and men alike if
they did not muster the appropriate toughness to compete. Vilde, the
confident 13-year-old snowball-sniper, did not, at least in any discursive
way, project any female inabilities when it comes to throwing or any fears
whatsoever of being hit back. Not all the girls on the team were as vocally
tough as Vilde, yet handball was an arena in which all the girls were wel-
comed to develop and embrace their bodily experiencing of toughness.
The social life of athletes is not restricted to the game itself, the warm
ups or the practice session. Parents and coaches often agree that lessons
learnt in handball are lessons well applicable for life outside the arena and
vice versa. When I first met up with the team of 13-year-old girls, they
told me how they had traveled to the mountains, gone hiking, dived into
120 T. B. BROCH
rivers, slid down natural stone slides. “After doing this, will you be afraid
of an opposing player coming at you on the fast break?” coach Katrine
recited herself explaining how she fused gameplay with mountain climbs
and river dives. This form of enchanted transference, the ways in which
sacred meaning from social life shaped handball life and vice versa, was of
great importance to keep its meaningful practice going. This was so, not
only in sustaining dialogs among and between adults and children but
also in the sensuous experiencing of the game itself, of play. This process
of embodiement is carried out in ways involving and infusing corporal acts
with meaning—in actions and words that reverberate solidarity in tough-
ness. In the experiencing of cultural mastery. Controlling the materiality
of the ball. Mastering the social relations of the game. In the very phe-
nomenology of the throw. This is a performative striving for a split second
of omnipotence (Winnicott, 1971/2005). It is when meaning and mate-
riality fuses in the sensation of a perfect shot, with iconic forces ripping
through the cultural body in flow. Arguably, Vilde does not think about
her schoolyard snowball wars during a handball attack. How she with
sniper precision hits the boys right in the face. Mia probably does not feel
like a lumberjack out there on the court and her coaches do not believe
that she is a mannish lumberjack. What unites broad and specialized cul-
ture and what transcends schoolyards, mountain cabins, and sport, is the
playful attempt to direct social performances. By far, the most important
requisite to becoming a handballgirl is immersion into toughness, to feel
tough, and to find it felicitous.
Vilde’s recurrent throwing is essential to her skill-based learning.
Strengthening her body in this way provides her the corporal feel of a
hardened shoulder and a rhythmic throw. Yet it was “values,” “attitude,”
“motivation,” and “sports joy” that was held by the coaches to be the keys
for learning, sticking with the throw, and succeeding. Mia’s strength and
throwing velocity makes the lumberjack a suitable stereotype to play with
as her body hardens through the strain of enduring physical drills. None
of the girls are thought to undo or bend gender, they were an “energetic
and enthusiastic group of girls,” being normatively active, healthy, and
sportive. Contrary to Young’s (1980) assertion, the pushing and shov-
ing with significant force that is done by handballgirls summons the full
force of their muscularity and the system of background codes, myths
and narratives that direct, condense and elaborate the experience. Tech-
nical game skills are important but also the ability to play with moralities
and passions are key to the act. Sports are institutional performances in
which dramaturgy are somaticized.
The girls have been summoned and now surround Bjørn. He picks up
the ball and, like a soccer goalie, he kicks it the full length of the court.
Nothing happens. “Well, go get it!” The girls turn around and run a full
sprint, like a pack of predators that have seen their shot at prey. “Good
job! Bring it back. Remember, it is the team that wins the most rebounds
and loose balls that wins the game.” One of the girls hands him the ball
before she falls back in the circle of girls surrounding the coach. Bjørn
gently, almost unseen, drops the ball, right in the middle of the circle.
Again, nothing happens. “Well, get it!” Vilde dives in and grabs the ball,
nearly uncontested. “Hey girls, you got to get the ball,” Bjørn tells them.
The girls now get it and bend their knees in anticipation. The ball is
dropped and the girls dive in, some more fearless than others, colliding,
grabbing for the ball. Annette leaves the circle crying. “Oh my,” assistant
coach Mari softly calls out, seemingly to herself, “this is one of those
moments that I have to take a step back,” and refrain from wanting to
comfort the crying girl. Annette sits down, crying on the bench, as we
watch wave after wave of girls diving into the circle, walking calmly back
into formation, then diving in again. Some girls are laughing, some are
more hesitant. Some of the girls are passionate, some are more doubtful.
First one by one, then in pairs of two. Siri mumbles something. “Hey,
what was that I heard Siri?” Bjørn calls out in a friendly and loud voice
for all to hear. “I dear, I dear!” Siri corrects herself in a tone of confidence
and clenching her fist in a motion of determination “I can do this!” Mari
and I step over to Annette that has now wiped off her own tears and is
quietly watching the girls. “We missed you this weekend,” Mari declares,
“how are you? Want to go home to mommy?” Mari’s dramaturgy is so
exaggerated that Annette smiles and Mari can easily take a seat beside
her, hug her, and stroke her back “It is ok, Annette” Mari tells her.
These rhythmic relationships are full of agentic promises. Coach Mari’s
performance is quite brilliant. In dramatizing a mother figure, so highly
exaggerated, she carves out a space in which she can take the place of a
mother without telling Annette and me that she is actually responding
to the signal from a crying girl. In calling out that this is play, that her
act is unserious, Mari can in fact play out the role of the seriously caring
mother, “it is ok,” without anyone loosing face and without disturbing
the toughening of Annette. On the court, waves of girls keep beating on
the materiality of the ball and, sometimes, colliding into each other. It
resembles a sort of machinery, a pounding piston that is both shaping
and infusing the girls with a specific system of meaning. It is not all about
122 T. B. BROCH
winning the ball from your opponents. It is also about diving into a space
alone, together, and to transform a quiet “I do not dare” into a loud “I
dare!” It is the agentic repetition of meaning put into action. In contrast
to Latour’s (2005) way of thinking about materiality, the ball does not
move the girls, they are set in motion by Bjørn’s fusion of its materiality
with the meaning systems making the ball into the magnet that directs the
girls corporal rhythms. It is the cultural force that is mediated through the
surface of the ball, what it means to feel it in the palm of your hands, to
wield it and redirect its path, which makes the girls dive in and retract
its materiality. It is not the ball, in and of itself, that directs the girls’
behavior, but the institutional play absorbed in its materiality. Bjørn can
simply show them, praise their effort. The young women themselves have
to buy into the codes that make the diving after a ball a sacred corporal act
and an achievement of toughness. In turn, these and other performances
will shape the girls’ own materiality.
Sport drills are more powerful when they enlist body techniques with
deep meaning (Smith, 2008). The institutionalized play, unlike the Fou-
caultian sport scholar might argue, does not only create disciplined and
robotic bodies emptied of meaning (Foucault, 1977). Rather than ending
in disenchantment, drills and body techniques are inserted in meaningful
universes that allow individuals to become single beings of a synchronized
movement (Collins, 2004). The piston of bodies, its aesthetics, is fueled
by codes that make mastery over own pains and dislikes a shared and
cultural bracketing out of egotism. Ironically, entering this flow through
meaningful mastery is dependent on a motorization of skills that provide
players the intuition to notice other details and rhythms than game basics.
Rather than the becoming of machine-like individuals devoid of subjec-
tivity, it is a reworking of the self by entering shared flows and exiting by
feeling nevermore like true individuals (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).
Handballgirls in the Making, Part II: Sensing

a Meaningful Universe
The girls are doing jump rope outside. It is warm ups, before the practice
session and handball drills commence. The weather is just perfect. One
of the girls is laughing, as June has to lead the group in some aerobic-
style dance moves: “do not do anything silly now, do not embarrass us.”
They run, knees high, on the spot. “Nothing to be embarrassed about, I
will clap the bass line, and you can do the dancing,” Bjørn is laughing.
He has no rhythm at all. He is more into push-ups. The 13-year-old girls

get down on the track-and-field ground and start the push-up drill. Bjørn
gently puts his foot on one of the girl’s back and pushes her to the floor.
“Bjørn! I am getting dirt all over.” She exaggerates in brushing dust of
her pants. “Can you not do push-ups with me on your back?” Bjørn
laughs. Not even Bjørn could do push-ups carrying the addition of his
own weight, about 100 kg. Several girls are wiping dust off clothes and
hands. The coaches shake their heads as they direct my attention toward
little Siri who spends more time removing dust from her hands, than
doing push-ups. “HEY, you really have to do your pushups correct Siri,
or else you will have to do 25 more!”—“Oh god no!” Siri exclaims, with
such honesty and in such a heartfelt manner, that all the coaches burst
out laughing. “OK, pair up – Let’s wrestle” the coaches move on, “find
someone of about equal size.” The girls scurry around for quite a while
to find an appropriate sparring partner. Mia and Emilie finally find each
other and start out with a good, warm and long hug. “Hey, wrestling,
not hugging” the coaches smiles and laugh in light despair. “Are we really
just gonna wrestle, like, on the spot?” asks Mia, before she starts doing
the drill, standing upright, pushing and shoving Emilie, like she has done
about a thousand times before.
As we walk into the arena, I ask whether they have pictures and names
of all the girls, like so many teams now have, often posted on web pages.
The always cheerful Mari looks me square in the eyes, “Oh yeah, so you
think all the girls look alike. Everyone has light blond hair and a pony-
tail?” I laugh back but must admit that it is somewhat hard learning all
25 names. We step on to the court and Tiril, another girl with light blond
hair and a ponytail approaches us. “Trygve, do you know how to tape a
thumb?”—“Well, how did you hurt it? Was it forced backwards, to the
side? Can you show me?”—“Well, it was sort of, like, crushed, so it got
sprained.” I have to struggle a bit to keep my composure, not smiling too
much, and also figuring out what to do next. Unfortunately, I am a slow
thinker. “I am not quite sure how one tapes a thumb that has been, well,
crushed. I am not sure taping will help you.” Yet Tiril wants to tape and
she really thinks it will help. Mari, the more experienced coach of the
two of us, knows just what Tiril needs. “Let me give it a try” she smiles,
“You know, it might just help a little for the psyche, like, a little bit of
psychological taping.” Tiril is really happy about the help she is getting
as Mari, with the utmost sincerity, wraps sports tape around and around
her thumb. “Was it too tight, perhaps,” Mari wonders. “Did the tip of
124 T. B. BROCH
your thumb go all white, I better loosen it a little, there we go, let us see
if that does the trick,” Mari smiles to Tiril who got just what she came
for and runs happily back onto the court.
The sport tape is both a physical force and a moral power. A symbolic
condensation fused to the meaningful body-object (Alexander, 2008;
Champagne, 2018). Sport tape does not hold the iconic force of the
handballgirl, but is a tangible form in which her intangible substance is
represented. Not only does sports tape signal toughness, but it is also an
affirmation of the sacred qualities of the handball code. It is a visual proof
that you have been aggressive on the court and sacrificed yourself for the
team. In the media, sports tape evokes cultural conceptions of sport as
war. Journalists claim “Metlecic [Croatian], looks like he’s been to war,”
because “he has bandages and patches all over his face.” It has an aesthetic
surface that brings to mind the badge of honor and distinction from war
participation (Daloz, 2010, p. 163, Note 22). For the athlete herself,
sports tape is not only experienced visually but also through the screech-
ing sound it makes when ripped off the tape roll and the feel of how it
attaches to and supports the body. It is sticky underneath and has a rough
surface that, when attached to a hand or any other limb, gives a sensu-
ous feeling of a reinforced and roughened corporal materiality. While its
main medical significance is thought to be that of stabilization, its mate-
riality also provides an entrance into iconic flow. Tiril wants the sensory
experience of the handball code, to feel it by evidence of the senses. She
is given psychological taping. This enchantment is brought to life as the
aesthetic surface of the tape snaps into alignment with the moral depth of
toughness and women’s power. Tiril wants to show us and to feel tough.
Mari, her coach, knows this and allows her to immerse in play with its
material affirmation.
The cultural force of the sports tape can more easily be applied, at least
by empathic coaches like Mari, than the bodily feeling of muscles hard-
ened by weight training or push-ups. Yet, it is the combination of sport
tape, muscularity and meaning that spawns a handballgirl into behaving
contrary to what Young describes as typical to girls and women. Handball-
girls throw their whole body into a motion, they are trained not to stiffen
and to gain full control of their motions. These are play-processes. Bodies,
tape, and handballs become transitional objects for the girls to gain con-
trol of their surroundings. Complete control is, of course, never retained.
When bodies, sports tape, and handballs are put in game motion—when
the girls enter into the playing out of the social relationship of handball.
These meaning systems are attempted fused with the sport experience.
Taking an extended part in the dramaturgy of handball is only done if it
is meaningful in both an institutional and broader social sense. Handball
is therefore condensed and elaborated by broadly available narratives and
myths, both comic and epic, as the girls are guided and have to find out
if handball is meaningful to them.
The weekend arrives with new chances and Bjørn is ready to capitalize.
“Are you ready girls? Ready to step onto the court and fight? Today, we
really have to bleed to get the victory.” Some of the girls look puzzled.
Why does this game matter so much? Mari tells us that the head coach
of the opposite team used to play on the same team as Bjørn. “So it is
kind of, like, a little bit ‘war’, you know,” Mari lets us know and gestures
a set of quotation marks as she calls out the “war game.” “I can only say,
like they did on TV2, sacrifice your lives. Just go out there, give it your
all and fight hard. And, we are going out there to have some fun and to
smile too,” Bjørn finishes with a smile himself. “Are you rea-dy for the
game!?” coach Katrine picks up were Bjørn left us. A few girls smile and
quietly nod. Lisa’s fingernails are sparkling pink. All the girls have done
their long hair in various ponytails. Mette and Mia with a long ponytail
only secured at the top, loose at the tip. Solveig has her signature braided
pigtails that join in the back. “Are you looking forward to the game!?”
Katrine encourages the girls again. A couple more of the young women
are now tuning in and the response is little bit louder “yeah!” “We have
to run hard on the fast breaks, keep moving our feet on offense and
communicate on defense. Are you ready to go out there and have some
fun and smile? Who is going to sing before the game? Now that Vanessa is
not here?”—“Vilde!” someone shouts—“Vilde!,” Vilde responds loudly
and smiles. “Well what am I going to sing? Who are we going to beat up
on today, la, la, la!” Vilde cheers kindly.
The warm ups are soon done, the girls have thrown their arms warm,
jogged their legs warm and wrestled their minds and bodies in prepa-
ration. Game time is fast approaching. “We need maximum effort right
from the start! Anyone know the name of the red-haired girl that plays on
Larvik, in the center of their defensive formation?” Bjørn asks. The girls
take their time thinking. Too much time. “Tonje Larsen!” Bjørn exclaims.
“Does she have read hair?” a couple of the girls wonder. “Yes, she does,
just a little bit bleached perhaps. Anyway, the point is, that when she plays
defense, she just reaches out with her arms and boom. You have to be a
little angry!” Mari pulls out an imaginary microphone and asks Camilla
126 T. B. BROCH
“Can you get angry?” Camilla timidly nods her head and smiles, slightly
embarrassed. “Christine, do you ever get mad at home?”—Christine nods
her head in all honesty, grinds her teeth and snarls quietly “My dad says
I have to be more angry on the field.”
The game is tight and the play is indeed a little bit angry and tough.
Emilie dives through the opponents’ defense, scores, and smacks against
the blue plastic court, it almost sounds like she lands flat on her entire
body. She runs to the bench for a quick break. “Are you ok?” I ask as
she is seated—“Yes, it is just, I keep landing a little funny, like flat, and
it hurts a little, you know. But I am ok now, really.” Emilie looks at me
in a very serious way and the coaches are soon to get her back on the
court. She gets a great pass, jukes past a defender and, once more, smacks
onto the court. She gets up. Takes a quick look at the bench and then
starts blowing into her hands, as if she has burnt herself on her palms.
She runs back on defense. She lowers her hands, straight down, alongside
her body—turns around to face the opponents’ new attack—and with a
slightly worried look to her eyes she keeps blowing into the air, like she
is putting out an imaginary fire, and then signals to herself, clenching her
fists alongside her body, “it is ok, calm down, it is ok. I am ready!”
Another opponent hits the floor, crying, sobbing. Mia, one of the
stronger and heavier players on our team, has tackled an unlucky chal-
lenger that went flying sideways and is now on the court, twisting and
turning in pain. The game is stopped, and the coaching staff is allowed to
run onto the court and aid the crying girl. Perhaps I look a little baffled
by the situation, so Vilde wakes me up from my trance, “Trygve, that
was nothing – it is she that is leaning down and gets Mia’s arm right in
the chest.” Nothing much to it Vilde tells me. “Well, perhaps she got the
wind knock out and got a little scared,” I suggest. Vilde turns toward
me and looks me straight in the eye, “She cannot possibly bee in any real
pain when she is twisting, turning and worming around like that. If she
had been injured, she would not have the energy to do that. She is not in
pain!” Mia, however, has frozen. She is standing at the exact same spot in
which she delivered the tackle. She now has a twisting and crying oppo-
nent at her feet, as well as two coaches, a referee and several players that
have come running to help and comfort the crying attacker. Mia looks
somewhat paralyzed. Bjørn shouts her name, a couple of times, before
she awakens from her trance. “Mia! Mia,” Bjørn waives her to the side-
line to give her praise and tell her that when an opponent gets floored like
that, you have to step away. Time-in, the game resumes and defense turns
to offense. Mia takes the shot, it goes right into the defender’s hands,
holding her arms up high to block the shot. Mia despairs, immediately
turns around and runs straight to the bench, making the substitution
herself. It is just one of those days. “It is not working! It is not working!”
she despairs. I squat besides her seated on the bench and point to the
defender that bravely blocked her shot. “Look, can you see, she is still
blowing on her fingers. Next time, I bet she will think twice about block-
ing the shot, keep at it!” Mia swallows her distress, smiles, and chuckles
a bit. Mia throws like a handballgirl, she knows it, and we can see the
stinging proof.
Regardless of all the toughness the girls can muster, the game is lost.
Back in the locker room, Nora comes over to the coaches and asks for a
Band-Aid, she has gotten a small scratch on her underarm. “WOW, what
a game Nora!” I praise her, “on defense and on offense.” Nora thanks
me politely for the positive feedback as she gets her Band-Aid from coach
Katrine. She turns around to face the girls, who are crammed down on
the benches, directly in front of her in the narrow locker room. She leans
her back comfortably against the sink while carefully applying the Band-
Aid. She looks really sad, but the praise keeps coming from all the corners
of the small room. Vilde gets up, goes over to Nora and gives her a big
hug. “It is all about attitude,” Bjørn summarizes and wraps up the game.
Bodily experiences are shaped by and evoke culture. In turn, culture is
used to maneuver the experience. Sport is not only a play for the audi-
ence but also a play of your own mind and body. Its dramas and high-
pitched emotions can leave actors and audiences perplexed and passion-
ately resolute. While Mia and I freeze by the screams from the hitee, her
coaches run full force to aid her as she is twitching and turning like a
professional soccer player. At an instance, Mia’s physical strength and the
opposing players daring attempt to pass her, forces a timeout in which
Mia finds no performative answer to the results of her act. The coaches
of the crying girl however rush out in immediate displays of team spirit
to a dramaturgy they cannot disregard. It might seem vulgar to label this
high-pitched drama as fun, but with Goffman (1961), fun is exactly what
it is. Games allow us to perform the right amount of culture that keeps
felicitous immersion going. While the girls are experiencing various parts
of handball as more or less fun, it seems plausible that the girls that keep
at it find some meaning in being tough together. The handball code thus
becomes a shared way of understanding and of directing narratives, myths
and social actions that are deemed proper. The code can also be used
128 T. B. BROCH
to sanctify some actions and pollute others. The opponents’ act of sac-
rifice and toughness, being leveled to the floor, is deemed unsuccessful
by Vilde. Yet, she eagerly gives her own teammate’s meager scratch and
Band-Aid drama full recognition as an appearance of truthful toughness.
The way in which Nora savors the Band-Aid moment, leaning comfort-
ably against the sink for all to see, is generated by a deep play with hand-
ball toughness. She experiences the cultural force of an object that has
subsumed its social meaning system and that pulls the attention of the
whole locker room. Nora is not even on the court. The Band-Aid allows
her to savor her women toughness as the game is over.
Emilie’s gesture of blowing into her hands can, both meaningfully and
materially, put out and soothe the bodily experiencing and burning sen-
sation of smacking onto the court. Likely, Emilie’s careful blowing on her
fingers also gives more energy to the burn. It shows how the girls actively
engaged in meaningful emotion management. Plausibly, such instances
become rarer as the girls grow older, if and when they turn into elite
handballgirls. Then game time seems to slow down, vision intensifies,
bodies harden, and techniques allow them to more often avoid smacking
onto the floor. To be sure, there is automation here (Foucault, 1977).
A throwing of millions of passes and thousands of shots. Making hun-
dreds of tackles. Foucault is right about this, but we must remember
that “this is a journey into an enchanted world, not away from it. The
process is about controlling, directing and capturing meanings, emotions
and selves, not eliminating these” (Smith, 2008, p. 282). This process of
socialization itself is deeply performative. The athlete has time and time
again blown out the burn to create a scar tissue armor. She has been
instructed to look at the elite handballgirls’ grit and perseverance. This is
how bodies become tough as stone, taped up by the Band-Aids of valor to
experience the full phenomenology of the throw. While these meanings
become embodied and altered through time, they remain meaningfully
reexperienced in the aesthetics of the deep drama.
In a Norwegian culture of sameness, shaped by the monumental waves
of feminism, many girls and young women are encouraged by fathers and
mothers to be able to put out the sting of competition and to experience
the mastery of throwing like a girl. The girls I observed were cheered
to do sports, to use their whole bodies in performing demanding physi-
cal tasks and in diving into the social world of handball. Given the high
number of Norwegian girls that take part in this sport that holds the char-
acteristic gender scholars have labeled “traditionally masculine,” I could
do nothing less than ask about the coaches’ feminist ambition or bending
of gender. But coaches and athletes I met at the arena were not outspoken
feminists. They were trying to keep their children active, happy, healthy,
and part of the social life of their peers. Whenever I proposed that they
should keep both women and men coaches on their team, they looked
baffled, uncaring, and started to explain how they were trying to manage
their daily routines. Still, we found much in common and much joy in dis-
cussing coaching practices from “the stone age” that contrasted the leg-
endary coach Marit Breivik’s democratic leadership. While their practice
did reproduce ideals of toughness, it did not resemble what Theberge’s
(2000) ethnography defined as accommodating hegemonic masculinity.
None of us thought highly of men or women coaches that were authori-
tative, patriarchal, and yelling at their athletes. We laughed wholehearted
at screaming and swearing coaches, “in what way possible will that help
the kids?” we wondered. Similar to the journalists’ explored earlier, the
coach conductor embraced the ambivalence of play in trying to strike just
the right cord of the moment, of the group and the game rhythm. In
a feminist sense, the phenomenology of the throw that was guided by
the handball code brought together the world of handball and an ideal
society moving in and to sameness.
Performative Repetition of Toughness: The

Problematics Kindness
At the arena, the head coaches Katrine and Bjørn despaired when the
13-year-old girl players’ performances were too kind. What was actually
meant by this? The Norwegian word “snill” (kind) is derived from the
Norse “snjallr” meaning “fast, skilled, smart and good.” Today, being
“snill” is mostly thought of as being pliable, obedient, loving, generous,
and friendly. Opposite of “snill” in Norwegian is the term “slem.” “Slem”
stems from the Low German word “slim,” that means “crooked.” The
word has associations with being harmful, hard, uncouth, difficult, bad,
and repulsive. Did the coaches really want unkind and bad players? It is
clear that the words “snill” and “slem” are polyvocal. They can mean sev-
eral things. We have a good idea of what I mean in the media depictions
of handball. What does it mean in the arena?
Even if the girls’ team I observed were working on an act that was
going to be less snill, they also had clear and positive perceptions of what
it may mean to be generous and friendly with one another. On the way to
130 T. B. BROCH
practice, I am given a lift by Mari, her daughter Tiril and players Hedda
and Siri. In the car, the weekend’s matches are discussed. “Trygve, per-
haps you can help us out a bit here. Tiril was wondering whether we
didn’t see her dive through the defence because we didn’t applaud.”—
“Mother!” Tiril exclaims in frustration. “That’s not what I said. I just
said that I wondered if I had made a mistake, if I had stumbled, was
out of bounds; that there was no goal because no one clapped. So I was
unsure…”—“Yes, yes, that’s what it was,” Mari concedes. “But wasn’t
Trygve standing beside me, and didn’t he simply say ‘Yes! Good!’ when
it happened? Isn’t that how it was Trygve?” “That’s true. It was a great
goal, and you had a lot of nice breakthroughs this weekend.” Hedda adds
“Yes, and I forgot to add just now that Hilde was also brilliant.” “That’s
great, superb, it was fun. So we should be happy for her then,” Mari
happily settles as she parks the car and we make our way up to the arena.
Thinking that it is only elite athletes that are objects of praise and
criticism, is simply wrong. Not only did the girls receive praise and criti-
cism. Many wanted to be seen. Many wanted to give praise and criticism
themselves. From the position of an almost witty dedication to the game,
Tiril is confused when she does not get the response she is expecting.
The response she has learned is normative coach, teammate, and spec-
tator behavior. She is unsure as to whether the goal she had scored was
counted or not. She saw the ball go into the goal but heard no applause.
Could this mean that the goal was annulled? Did she make a mistake?
At the arena, everyone learns to watch out for and listen up for certain
cues and clues. Everyone present is expected to participate in the hand-
ball drama, in which applause signals the specific result of an action. No
applause, no goal scored. Participation in dramaturgy is also participating
in a community in which we recognize one another through emotional
praise and moral beliefs (Alexander, 2006, 2015). It is about guiding each
other in kindness, selflessness, and generosity. During the car ride, Hedda
picks up these cues and clues, and is quick to interject, almost out of the
blue, that also “Hilde was great” this weekend. Whether Hedda admires
or envies Hilde’s success—dramaturgic loyalty to the code of belonging
are enacted to perfection; we are snill and take care of one another. In this
democratic project, the coaches had enough girl players to divide them
into two complete teams. Many of our coaching colleagues in the club
split their players into a first-and second-string team, according to their
athletic skills. But, this was not the case in this team. “We have divided the
girls into two equal groups for the sake of solidarity and skill development.
This is a bit different from the way many others do it,” the coaches told
me. Not everyone agreed with their practice. “We have gotten some nega-
tive feedback from people who think we are too snill and are not devoted
enough and so on, but we did quite well last year and have fairly good
results to show for it.” Who are negative? I asked. “Other coaches, peo-
ple in the club. Parents of our best players think that we don’t push them
hard enough.” From my observations in this club and elsewhere, I believe
them. In terms of competitive play, being snill can be a hindrance, or in
any event problematic. This was also a major criticism against the coach-
ing style of the iconic Marit Breivik, whenever she did not win a medal.
For some, the term snill in this respect implies a lack of understanding
of the “nature of sport,” and appears to limit the opportunities for cul-
tivating the best players. Head coach Katrine knows this, but chose to
be snill in emphasizing individual development and team solidarity rather
than speedy success. Yet, taking kindness to be unambiguously positive is,
in other words, too simplistic.
In the course of a team meeting, the multiple interpretations of kind-
ness became clear. Several new players had started on the team this sea-
son. One, saying that they had all been well-received. “Oooh, that’s so
nice,” answers assistant coach Mari. Coach Katrine asks the girls whether
they consider the objectives that the coaches have laid down to be “suffi-
ciently snill, too snill, or too tough.” Another one of the new girls, Tuva,
answers that the team has many good players and that the objectives are
realistic. She submits that “When I first heard about the goals, I thought
that perhaps they were a little too much, but I have never been to the
playoffs or anything like that before, so…….” Mari is obliged to ask Tuva
to speak louder so that everyone can hear what she is saying. However,
coach Katrine has heard everything and paraphrases. “Tuva says she thinks
our objective of making it to the finals seems realistic, and that she has
never been in a playoff situation before and that she would like to be.”
I and Katrine hear two slightly different messages. I took what Tuva said
to mean that the objective was “a bit much.” Katrine heard that Tuva
really wants to be in the playoffs. In a sense, we are both probably right.
Together, coaches and players try to strike a balance, one in which the
objectives they set are neither too snill nor too tough. Their aim must
not be so low that their goals do not stimulate development; neither
should they be so ambitious as to be unrealistic. The coach’s perception
of the girls is that they are not only players but also human beings in-the-
making (Ronglan, 2016; Trondman, 2013). Handball is part of social life
132 T. B. BROCH
and an arena for developing into responsible and well-rounded adults.

Katrine attempts to both listen to and guide the young girls so they can
develop ownership of the team’s aims. So that the players themselves want
to set realistic and challenging objectives. The girls are trained not only
in handball technique; they also learnt to hone their mental skills through
personal and collective objectives. This is the democratic leadership-ideal
of the renowned Marit Breivik in action. Sports provide the occasion for
the girls to play together in a relationship. The term ‘snill’ can be asso-
ciated with elevated ideas of talented, wise and tough democratic choices
of action, and the problem of being passive and too snill in competitive
encounters. To map out the complexities of the handball code in action,
the problem being too snill is thematized next.
Being Snill on the Handball Court: When

the Match Gets Underway
On the court is where the girls practice their sport together. To build a
well-functioning team, one must put individual concerns slightly to the
side, or at least make them well suited for the concerns of the team
(Ronglan, 2000, 2009). This does not, by any means, imply that the girls
leave their ambitions behind. It suggests that team sports demand a team
performance.
Katrine goes first into the girls’ locker room, looks around and turns
back toward us. “All clear.” We all pile in. Bjørn is the first to speak.
“This is about attitude, girls; every time [the handballgirl] Heidi Løke is
on the offense, she just must have that ball. Every time the ball is thrown
in her direction, she must have it. She is totally awesome and raw. ‘The
ball is mine,’ she says. Likewise, also you—must —want to have that ball.
And, you just cannot be so snill to your opponent. Yesterday there were
a couple of our players, on the wings mostly, who were very snill to the
opposition. They were standing with their arms held into their bodies,
hanging at their sides.” Bjørn clasps his arms against his sides and hangs
his head like a sad castle guard. “There is absolutely no point in being
so snill. School is where you’re expected to be snill. That’s where you’re
supposed to sit still and put your hand up. Not on the handball court.
That is for school.” Katrine interjects, “You are not going to get the
MVP [most valuable player] award by being snill. As a matter of fact,
you won’t win anything at all in handball by being snill,” she affirms in a
tough, honest, and serious tone. She has been a handballgirl herself.
The problematics of kindness is far from unique to this particular girls’

team. Looking at both media and practiced youth sport makes us to real-
ize this. At the arena is where we witness the socialization of the code.
Like the handball boy cannot stand with hat in hand, the handball girl
should not wait patiently with her arm raised like a pupil. When in their
school pews, the girls sit still. The snill schoolgirl actively listens and does
not speak up without being given permission to by the teacher. The hand-
ball player on the other hand cannot be still and wait for permission. She
must and just has to have the ball. These stereotypes and Heidi Løke guide
the shaping of an exemplary and stereotypic handballgirl . Løke is never
interested in whether the opposition wants the ball, or whether it is her
turn to shoot. As a women role model, the stereotype Løke exemplifies
how young Norwegian girls, with enough hard work and training, get to
learn how to take an opportunity when it is offered, and create one where
it is not. When in flow, the handballgirl does not dismiss meaning in favor
of omnipresence. She achieves immersion and meaningful control of her
game environment when experiencing toughness. This cognitive simplifi-
cation of sport life, provides her with feelings of right and wrong, right
and left, as well as immediate responses to the success and failure of her
actions. The coaches I followed wanted a small gang of girls with the
sensory capacities of Løke.
“Hey, listen up girls!” Bjørn raises his voice during halftime. “Our effort
is ok on defence and ok on offense. But, what is going on, why are we
so snill ? Can you not get sharp on offense and be a bit tougher on the
defence? What is it we have these two things for?” Bjørn muses, pointing
to his legs. Coach Katrine takes a step forward and ads “And we have
another tool too. Is there someone who knows what it is?” - “The head,”
Helene replies happily. “Yes, it is good to use one’s head,” but Katrine’s
tone of voice implies that this is not, by far, the right answer. “What about
these here?” she asks and waves her arms around. “On defence, we have to
mobilize our arms so that we can properly deal with the attacking player.”
She slams her hands into Bjørn’s chest. “These hands are not for cud-
dling.” She begins to caress Bjørn’s chin “Oh, tickle, tickle, tickle… there,
there.” She rubs his arm as if he was a baby and as Bjørn responds with
an “Aa, gagaga.” – Katrine states “No! You have to get your arms out
there and take hold, move, steer and push.” She drums her hands into
the right spot, grabs hold of Bjørn’s jacket and pulls to reinforce her grip,
whilst at the same time positioning her feet shoulders-width apart in order
to maintain balance. “How snill you all are!” Bjørn regrets loudly, while
134 T. B. BROCH
stretching out with his arms in a hopeless manner. “We are standing out
there like a bunch of penguins.” Bjørn draws his legs together and rocks
on his feet like a penguin, back and forth, back and forth. Right before he
is about to tip over, he jumps into a broad leg spread. As his shoes smashes
onto the floor, his arms shoot out – ready to take on the next attacker.
Alexander (2004) is inspired by Freud (1950) and claims that effective

dramatization consolidates symbolic meaning through the change of form
and the intensification of meaning. The coaches turn the handball game
into a play-interaction with an infant. Not like the courageous women,
protecting her infant at all cost, but play in which the women cuddle
a child. This intensifies the trainers’ message concerning how the girls
should not behave on the court. One is expected to be snill, affection-
ate, selfless, and friendly to small children, even if they are not to be
too spoiled. Handball players should obviously be friendly and cooper-
ative with their teammates, their coach and those in charge. However,
being snill on the handball court, being passive and friendly toward the
“enemy,” this is no recipe for victory. In the coaches’ role-play, cultural
stereotypes are used that on their own can mean many things, but that in
this dramaturgy point in one particular direction. What we are witnessing
is a meaning-making that allows actors to play with and question subor-
dination and stereotypes. These girls are not merely prospective mothers
with hands for cuddling. Their hands wield toughness in flesh. In the
girl’s throws and tackles, an iconic performance links a broad narrative to
the situated action. The girls become elements informing the broad sto-
ry’s entirety. This story has been thickly laid out throughout this book. It
is the tale of the Norwegian handballgirl.
Handballgirls cannot allow themselves to crumble like cookies, or to
be snapped in two like thin piece of flatbread. According to Lund (2013),
combinations of abstract fiction and concrete physical movements consti-
tute a powerful didactic strategy. This is a form of cultural mastery that
regardless of whether you are going to become a handball girl or not, it
is a way of being that is both shaped by and can be brought back into
the symbolic landscapes surrounding the play. At the arena, gender pro-
vides stories, stereotypes, and myth that are flexibly used to maneuvre and
guide actions. In Norway, this happens through normative sport partici-
pation in a culture where the principle of equality plays a central narrative
role. In the sacred aura of the national women’s team, handball is one of
the largest institutions in which Norwegian girls can learn about how to
perform a democratic competition.
Sporting Emotions: How Culture

Structures Shape Feelings
“ALWAYS keep your eyes on the goal!” Bjørn shouts and stops the play.
Picking up the ball and with his 220 lbs heavy, 6 foot 8 inches tall
body, he thunders toward 13-year-old Lisa on defense. She covers her
eyes and bends her neck and shoulders in a dramaturgy of fear. “If the
defender does not engage, it will bang! [The former handballgirl-great]
Trine Haltvik probably scored 10.000 goals by banging the ball passed
defenders. Like this”—in a determined stride toward the goal—and after
the shot—comes the follow-through and the arm. Bjørn illustrates by
throwing his arm at Lisa’s neck and shoulders, stopping an inch from
her body. Lisa theatrically hides her face in behind the palms of her hands
while Bjørn portrays Haltvik’s fearless attitude and, for defenders, dreaded
shooting technique. As a defender, when the follow-through comes “You
cannot stand with your hands on your hips” Bjørn finishes “You have to
defend yourself.” The practice ends, but some of the girls are still playing
around. Vilde picks up the ball and gives herself a live-game commen-
tary: “Nora Mørk and Heidi Løke!” She starts her own imaginary attack
sequence, herself as Mørk, passing the ball to her teammate who shoots
into the open goal “Ye(eeee)ah!” the miniature handballgirls collectively
holler.
The phenomenology of handball involves a dialectic initiation of cul-
ture in mind and body. Media images were regularly used at the arena
as girls and coaches used available female handball heroes in understand-
ing selves, others and the game script. Fearlessness in play comes at a
considerable cost. “You cannot be so[ooo] snill!” Katrine tightens Tonje’s
ponytail, gently shakes Susan’s necklace, and friendly picks at Tiril’s ear-
rings. Tiril smiles back and quickly remove her jewelry while Bjørn keeps
talking. “We have to practice a lot. And it’s like Katrine has said, you
have to be a little boyish up here.” Bjørn looks thoughtful while he holds
his right hand beside his head and slowly rotates his wrist. As if he is
fine-tuning a sophisticated clockwork. “You got to be a little gangsta,”
he goes on. “This is not school where there is someone who is making
you behave. This is handball. Girls are made of porcelain!” Bjørn quickly
ends his speech and puts his hand behind his ear waiting for the girls’
furious response. It never comes. An eternity of 4 seconds pass and I’m
about to assist him with a little scream. Then suddenly some of the girls
awaken and reply “NO way!” Bjørn received his answer and moves on
136 T. B. BROCH
“How do you think Katrine played the game? SHE was TOUGH!” Head
coach Katrine’s eyes ignite, she nods her head and smiles “Yup, I dished
out a lot of punishment, and I received my fair share.” She laughs kindly,
but her eyes are still burning as if she has been reminded of something
she’s proud of, something that has defined her, and made her who she is
today.
The two head coaches have loads of cultural capital and know the
game’s feeling rules by heart.2 In the words of Bjørn, game exertion is
signified by an adjustable mind-set and of “being a little gangsta.” This
is just a matter of attentive clockwork, the mechanics of culture in mind.
Indeed, cultural sociologists and Bjørn know that the process is far more
complicated than that. Yet these are the performatives he wants the girls
to accompany by its appropriate actions (Austin, 1957, p. 8). The semi-
otic opposition of being girlish, frail and made of porcelain is neither
game-efficient nor a gender appropriate reputation for these girls. The
coaches thus attempt to guide the girl’s understandings of what it takes
to do handball by using stereotyped notions of doing gender (West &
Zimmerman, 1987). The gender binary does not determine behavior, but
provides narrative poles that can shape the magnetic course and energy of
the act. They are not bending gender or challenging heteronormativity
(Butler, 1990). At the arena, being a true girl is no more threatened by
the cunning, combative, and aggressive boy, than the frail and passive girl
of porcelain. The performance can draw energy from both.
Handballgirl toughness is preferably performed with a smile on the
face. During my fieldwork, the newspaper Aftenposten declared that the
national women’s team was the most popular sport team in Norway—
regardless of sport and gender (Bugge, 2011). In the same way that the
young women greeted me to do fieldwork in her team and asking me to
rate their skills after having seen one game—the handballgirl herself rating
their play as “enthusiastic.” The elite athletes interviewed by the journalist
explain the team’s success due to their “enthusiastic” attitude and behav-
ior. The handballgirl recipe of the smile fuses “sports joy [idrettsglede]
and commitment” with a strategy that “the opponent never knows if [the
handballgirls] players are worried or disappointed,” they tell us. While
many sport heroines can be seen smiling after competitions, the handball
girls’ use the smile as a weapon also during the competition. Strategic
play-cheering is indeed a means to demonstrate and in turn produce col-
lective efficacy (Ronglan, 2007). The force of the smile is so well docu-
mented that also the national handballboys picked up on its prospects to
better their performance. Condensing the handball code with a smile gen-
erates an emotion management that takes the form a smiling pragmatics.
As did the prospective athletes at the arena, the interviewed elite players
tell us that “I have always admired the handball women, long before I
made the team.” This did not go unnoticed by the team I followed.
“It’s really important to express joy.” Bjørn is telling Mari and me
about the other boy’s teams he has coached. “When you score a goal, or
make a great tackle, then raise your arms!” Bjørn raises his arms high in
the air and smilingly flexes his biceps “It’s a really important message to
convey!” Mari agrees “It’s contagious you know.”—“The handball girls
too, they stretch their arms up, you know, smiling.” Bjørn responds,
raises his arms again and takes his big body tiptoeing on a small vic-
tory lap. As he returns, Mari announces that “Yes, that’s why they are
so popular. There was a poll in Aftenposten showing that the handball-
girls are the most popular national team in Norway. And, that’s because
they are so affable [blide] and enthusiastic. It’s contagious you know.”—
“Off course!” replies Bjørn. “That’s the difference between the handball
and the soccer -girls. While the handball girls are up here, the soccer girls
are, excuse me, down here you know. That’s no fun!” Bjørn theatrically
shows us the difference, one joyful celebration with hands up, and one
shoulder hanging and in complete lack of “charisma.” Mari thinks Bjørn
is a bit out of line, but all three of us nod our heads in agreement. Like in
a feedback loop. From televised myths of democratic heroes, to coaching
practices. Onto the face of young women becoming handballgirls. The
smile is powerful.
After all, the enchanted value of the smile had already been proven
by the head coaches of the national Norwegian women’s team and their
persistent success. By applying the success formula of the national team
it seems reasonable to believe that also the girls’ team could achieve suc-
cess, or at least improve their performance, by associating with the cultural
force of the national handballgirls. The winning formula of the smile also
allowed front stage performance of a democratic, harmonious, and happy
sport activity for the young Norwegian women. They were shaping real
wishes for solidary in actions and democratic power relations with a smile.
Its semiotic opposition—a smile turned upside down—was condemned.
“I’m gonna be a little cruel now. You move around out there with your
heads hanging. As if you have already lost the game – before the game
even started. Yes, they are [physically] stronger than you are and they
might beat us by a couple of goals. But not because you are standing out
138 T. B. BROCH
there moping !” Katrine impersonates her athletes: “Oooh I can’t do it,

I can’t do anything, I can’t”. Katrine shakes her head “When your chin
[frown is so long that it] sweeps the floor – you have lost the game before
the first whistle blow sounds.” Head coach Bjørn takes Katrine’s cue “You
are not a good defender because of your size, it’s because of your effort,
all the time – it starts here,” Bjørn ends and points to his head. Katrine
takes the lead and tries to reenergize her girls: “And where’s the smile?”
With her fingers, she draws a big smile on her own face, pulling the cor-
ners of her mouth, so the smile stays up. She smiles to the girls and some
smile back: “Let’s have some fun and show some guts!”
The smile’s semiotic opposition, the frown, was staged to show how
to manage deep emotions through a social performance of recognizable
feelings. The smile not only has the contagious effect of “spreading hap-
piness.” It masks a players’ frustration of her own act or lack of playing
time, as well as possible fears of mental and physical pain. The smile pro-
vides the tool to redefine the girls’ “emotions.” It turns frowns upside
down and reeducates skills and habits in deeply affective ways. The game
is shaped by the ways we read the behavior of others, how we think or
hope others read our behavior. The smile is thus used, consciously and
unconsciously, to direct own and others experiencing of social and mate-
rial realities. It displays a dramaturgic loyalty to a set of feelings rules
(Hochschild, 2012) that mediates emotions in ways that does not under-
mine the group relations and realities (Fine, 1987). The feeling rule of the
smile shapes a democratic act of competition as coaches and girls observe
and sanction the team and its joint effort. Parents, peers, and coaches
know this. They know how hard it is to mask one’s innermost disappoint-
ments. How tough it is for the young women whose self-image breaks,
the ways she sees herself and how she believes and wants others to see her.
“It is easier to smile when successful,” the interviewed elite handballgirl
admits. The prism of the smile breaks deeply felt success and defeat into
the rays of morality piercing actors and audiences in its light.
Bjørn ends his weekend wrap-up and turns toward me: “Now, I’m
going to have a chat with Kari, she’ll be given a crash course in smiling!”
He takes Kari for a walk to the stance—where most coach–athlete con-
fessions and communication occur—highly visible from the playing court
where the girls practice. When they return Kari looks unaffected. Bjørn
takes a stand beside me, and I assume he wants me to ask: “How did it
go?” Bjørn replies in an indiscrete volume: “She seems happy, content,
no response. I asked if she was acting up because she had to play a level
2 game. She said yes. So, I used Siri as an example. Showcase both your
skills and your attitude like Siri who played a great game, terrific hus-
tle and shows sport joy [spillerglede] – right. One should also use the
opportunity to practice playing at multiple positions; that makes you a far
more versatile player.” The smile is a meaningful tool to reassert the team.
When an ambitious and disappointed girl does not experience “real joy,”
or attempts to showcase her own agenda with a counter cultural and semi-
otic opposition to the smile—she is sanctioned by all coaches who actively
condemn the performance of a frown.
The smile allowed moments when the team’s performance of compe-
tition took on an appearance a harmonious meritocracy (T. B. Broch,
2015). Yet, it could never eradicate tensions. Regardless of individual
desires, the code guides desirable and undesirable group behavior that
is pleasant and unpleasant to the individual. Failure of performing these
shared rules can lead to social sanctions by the group and the individual’s
feeling of shame in commitment to a particular group and self-image.3
By way of masquerade, of deference to the meaning system, this charade
is highly dramatic as we all know of and can see through its disguise.
With Marx and Weber, the performative act is shown to reproduce the
team’s power relation and their mutual policing. It is also the meaningful
glue that easily breaks, and that generates frustrations and pleasures of its
irreconcilable poles of individual interests and team spirits. In a success-
ful performance, the code allows the heartfelt feeling of solidarity and a
transient leveling out of hierarchy. At the same time, it becomes a project
that allows coaches to spare themselves, and perhaps the audience of par-
ents, from some of their youths’ agonies. The drama, guided by processes
of felicity, dialog wishes of personal success, hierarchies of skill, and the
democratic team. To a cultural sociologist, sports provide great viewpoints
into how feeling rules guide front stage performances of harmony in com-
petition. Its cultural pragmatics puts feeling rules into team action and,
at least in normative theory, tries to make belonging affectively outweigh
alienation. This is a major part of the play project. The team can fail or
succeed. It can even do the opposite and try to alienate individuals instead
of pulling them together. Regardless, this is done in meaningful ways by
fusing broad and specialized moralities as embodied identities. It there-
fore has deeply felt consequences. It can make disappointed and happy
girls smile. When entering the boys team later on, we will see how team
projects make enthused boys despair to the sweet awful sound of a sad
clown.
140 T. B. BROCH
The Gendered Significance of the Smile

We are more than halfway through the season and almost halfway through
the coach–player chats. Kari, who “acted up” earlier has settled down.
Today taking a seat, next to us on the bleachers as Bjørn explains: “I
want you to be happy-Kari, not angry and moping. Take charge and work
hard. Like you have done lately. You might know the girl on the national
team, you know, the one who runs around like a big smile?”—“Camilla
Herrem!” Kari replies quickly and confident. “I don’t believe that she is
happy and smiling all the time – nobody are” finishes Bjørn before we
return to the court. The practice session eventually ends. Katrine gathers
the girls as Bjørn vividly conveys the essence of their practice: “In a game
of handball there are about 60 attacks for each team, roughly 30 goals are
averaged. This means that half of all attempts to score fail. Just run back
on defence and think ‘another chance [will come]!’ We cannot start crying
and hang with our heads just because we miss! When we succeed all of you
are like the national team. Then we are up here, right!” Bjørn makes his
signature celebration, stretching his arms high in the air, smiling. Assistant
coach Mari happily contributes shouting: “Camilla Herrem!” There is no
greater praise than imitation.
An icon of Scandinavian egalitarianism (Gullestad, 1991), Camilla Her-
rem’s body is inscribed with the smile. She is simply one of many players
on the national team that occasionally smiles. Just one player in a long line
of smiling handballgirls. She is also the materialization of the very pinna-
cle of Marit Breivik’s long and decorated time as a national coach. Her
smile signifies cultural mastery, a fusion of scripted skills and the dramatic
play “proving that you can be a girl and simultaneously generate results
as a team,” as Breivik argued.4 Criticized and adored for fusing notions
sameness to elitist sports, Breivik still managed to convince audiences that
equality in chance can generate equality in results. Deeply riddled with
gender politics and a charismatic act of democracy, as a successful women
athlete and role model with a ponytail: Herrem personifies this broad
politics, making the smile of toughness a normative and healthy way of
dealing with social competition.
Not by a long shot did the observed team and coaches consist of all-
out strategic and cynical actors brawling and smiling their way to the next
victory, more playing time, better performances, and charismatic appeal.
The smile’s authenticity was reliant on the girls’ playful immersion in ways
that also generated spontaneously and the heartfelt smiles. “How did the
games go this weekend?” I ask meeting assistant coach Mari and the two
girls Trine and Nina. “GOOOD, well, you two can answer” replies Mari
and smiles to the girls. They played two different games, both won. Nina
tells the story of the level 2 game: “we won the game 22-5.” Mari can-
not hold her own enthusiasm and explains that, “It was delightful. All
the girls chipped in. Every single girl scored one or more goals on level
1 and everybody, except three girls scored on level 2. It was nothing less
than magnificent. And scoring all those goals, I almost got a bad con-
science.”—“Yes, it’s no fun to lose by those numbers” I reply and Mari
agrees. “Well, fun for us” says Nina in a cheerful tone and we all agree!
Mari explains that our teams’ parents felt so bad about it that they started
applauding the opposition. Still, Mari announces, our player “Jessica, she
just stood there and smiled. She played both games and was just, shin-
ing, like a sun. There were a lot of girls that blossomed and sparkled this
weekend, I tell you that” ends Mari.
At times, the smile became unambiguously positive: a sign of joy. How-
ever, because the smiling of joy has this signaling effect it should be han-
dled with some care. It is inappropriate to smile at an opponent in despair.
The girls’ parents for that reason respectfully balanced the smile as a sig-
nified of joy at the cost of their opponent and therefore applaud the rival
team as well. Symbolic significance is, in other words, situational. Over
time, these patterns shape the symbolic tool of the smile itself. We should
embrace this potentially more daring recognition of ambivalence as a sig-
nificant mechanism of social structure (Spillman, 2012). These girls were
considered to be stereotypically healthy Norwegian girls. They were “a
very energetic and enthusiastic [sprek] group of girls.” While patriarchal
meaning might have been a barrier for their mothers and fathers, it no
longer saturated their cultural pragmatics in an endless recycling of male
power. On the contrary, gender was shaped by the performative fusing of
bodies, toughness, and Scandinavian egalitarianism. A toughness that was
not of a patriarch, but of a responsible participant in a democratic society.
These were some of the deep meanings that entered into the girls’ game-
play to shape its realities. Of course, this is not without tension, humor,
and pain. Democracy is a project. The handball code shaped the ways in
which the game script was to be played out and deep culture gave power
to its felicities. Molded by the forces of feminist waves, the ways in which
the meaning of sport intersects with gender at the youth sports arena
shows no mercy. Handball is about working together toward a shared
goal and the moral refinement that will take you there. As a player, you
142 T. B. BROCH
have to generate a performative feel for the game. You cannot just fuse
game structure with social power structures like Bourdieu (1990) would
argue or become a Foucaultian (1977) handball robot. You need to feel
the game’s meaning and give your inner life a new surface. If successfully
done, Band-Aids and sports tape, background representations and perfor-
mative skills can be carried back and forth between the social life of sports
and its surroundings.
“You are coming too Trygve,” it is really not a question. I and the
coaches walk over to the room where the Christmas party will take place.
The coaches have joined forces with the coaches of the same-aged boys
team to throw the teenage athletes an end of the year celebration. As any
other pack of committed coaches, our voluntary enthusiasm for the game
comes with us into the party. “It’s the whole team, you know. When
the national team loses a game, it’s not only the players, it’s the players
and the coaches. The team loses together, you know. After a game, I am
wondering what I, as a coach, could have done better. That’s what Marit
Breivik and the national handball team was all about. It’s about working
together towards a shared goal,” Bjørn tells us. I have to run out and
get some paper plates. A couple of the girls are waiting outside. “How
did you like playing the boys?” I ask? “Yeay, it was fun,” the smiles are
lined up right in front of me. “It was a lot of fun,” laughs Tiril, “and
a really good exercise too. The boys ended up leaning over their knees,
like, gasping for air, they were so tired! We are better trained than them,
I am mean, we were tired too of course,” June tells us. “It was so much
fun beating them! On that drill. Three on three. We got them. Ran right
through their defense,” Mia sports a big smile, while the other girls are
nodding their heads. “You know, Bjørn was not proud of the boys, they
really were not that god,” Tina explains and I cannot help to wonder why
the hell he should be or not be proud of the boys. “They are supposed
to be better than us at this age, you know. We are thirteen and the boys
should be bigger, faster, stronger, and better. So we should not be able to
beat them.”—“But, you did, did you not?” I laugh back at the cheerful
young women who keep up an act in which they are seemingly puzzled by
the boys’ inadequacies. “Yeah!” they sing back. “So, perhaps they are not
stronger or better than you, right? Was Bjørn proud of you then?”—“Oh
Yeah!” they reply again. “What makes it even more fun,” Tiril squints
her smiling eyes, “is that we go to school with the boys and they keep
bragging and bragging about how great they are. That makes it even
more fun to beat them.”—“Well you got to set them straight then!” I
reply. “That is so much fun,” smiles Tina. I run off to get the plates and
return.
Most of the girls have joined us, but we are still waiting for a little
group that is putting on makeup. The Pizza arrives and Bjørn wants to
make a speech. “I rarely highlight individual players,” some of us smirk
a little to Bjørn and this false truth, “but today I will,” he continues.
“Last game, an injured player started as goalie, but it did not go so well,
so we had to make some changes.” Emilie points to herself and smiles
dramatically embarrassed. She was the injured player they had to replace.
“Renate was therefore thrown into the net, to play goalie. Not only did
she do as she was asked, she made a huge effort!” Renate gets a well-
deserved round of applause. “It’s about doing what is asked of you,”
Katrine echoes. “There is a couple of things, still, that we have to work
on,” Bjørn continues. “When you watch the national [women] team,
there is this girl that is half Croation, a little bit Norwegian and a tiny
bit Swedish.”—“Amanda Kurtovic!” one of the boys shouts. “Well, she
actually plays a backcourt position on her club team, but plays winger on
the national team. That’s important, to be versatile. If she had said ‘no
thanks, I don’t want to play on the wing’, she would not have been play-
ing at all. She would not be on the national team. I want our players to
be versatile too. There are many chances during a game. If we miss an
opportunity, we cannot despair or start crying.” Bjørn looks very sad and
some of the boys giggle while a couple of girls put on a pardoning smile.
“When it comes to you boys !” Bjørn turns “you are just way out of shape.”
Now the girls giggle. “Hey, this is important. You need to take this seri-
ously and start exercising seriously.” But, all in all, Bjørn is happy and
his previously announced short speech, that once more got quite long, is
about over. He gets a bottle of wine for his voluntary effort and a hand-
written thank-you card. “Oh, this card is from Cecilia. She writes ‘dear
Bjørn, you are so great’,” Bjørn laughs while Cecilia shakes her head and
rolls her eyes. “Mom wrote the card. It says: ‘thanks for the effort and
the great job you are doing with the girls – merry Christmas.’ I have read
it. It’s the same for each of the coaches.”
144 T. B. BROCH
Notes
1. Cultural forces are anonymous and “attach to words spoken and gestures
made, as well as to material substance” that become vehicles of meaning
(Durkheim, 1912/2001, p. 202).
2. Cultural capital on the handball court should not be mysteriously explained
away by a structuring social structure that finds its parallel in aggregate
sweeps of all other social fields and institutions. Neither are its feeling rules
reducible to a macro social inequality structure of inequality that forces girls
and women to perform femininity. See Eliasoph and Lichterman (2003,
pp. 773–776) for a cultural sociology critique of Bourdieu (1990) and
Hochschild (2012).
3. Drawing on Durkheim’s (1912/2001) work on personality as formed by
culture, Goffman (1956, p. 474) argued that when “an individual becomes
involved in maintaining a rule, he [sic] tends also to become committed to
a particular image of self.” Any breach of this commitment threatens both
the one who does the breaching and the one who is supposed to govern
the meaning system.
4. My translation of Slagstad’s (2010, p. 762) accounting of Marit Breivik’s
ambitions and motivations for becoming a coach at the elite level.
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CHAPTER 5
Throwing Like a Handballboy: Enchanted

Flows of Power
I managed to convince the coaching team of a 15-year-old boys to let

me accompany them. Part of the reason, I would come to learn, was that
they needed a hand, another coach to help out, with their pack of about
23 boys. They were highly accomplished, among the best in the nation.
Among an approximate of 130 teams of 15-year olds, this team would
rate among the top four. Thus, they were not short of high hopes and
grand ambitions for the upcoming season and the many seasons to come.
While they often exuded their confidence to onlookers and to each other,
they also wanted to improve their practice and believed that I could help
in relieving their head coach who was overworked. Most importantly, like
the coaches of the girl team, they were proud of their work and wanted
to share their thoughts about coaching youth. To my analytic advantage,
the boy team was a stark contrast to that of the girl team.
The team of coaches has gathered for a post-season debrief and pre-
season visionary. It is my first meeting with them. The head coach of the
team of 15-year-old boys, Vidar, is a young man in his mid-20s. Not too
long ago, he put his own play-career aside to coach his younger brother.
Today, a staff made up of his players’ parents surrounds Vidar. Chris
and Rachel are the team’s equipment managers. Tore is Vidar’s assistant
coach, administrative coordinator and team economist. Vidar’s helpers are
all in their mid-50s, but despite this assembled team of adult coaches,
there was no mistaking, young Vidar is the man in charge of the boys.
He runs the team, their practice regime, and moralities. In this work,
Vidar’s devotion is unconditional. “You know, I am starting up in a new

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_5
148 T. B. BROCH
job this spring, but handball is what really matters to me… Don’t tell my
boss ok,” Vidar’s boyish charm makes us laugh. “Guys, how about hiring
a physiotherapist? The boys are getting older you know,” Vidar suggests.
In a split second of confusion, I am about to laugh respectfully at his wit-
ticism. Yet, in contrast to Vidar’s initial charm-offensive, this is no joke.
The coaches’ move their chat onwards with utmost seriousness and cues
me back in to make it symbolically explicit. This meeting is a heads up to
me. Vidar is giving off the impression of an honest and deeply committed
coach. By the end of the season, I would learn that he did not only talk
the talk, he stubbornly tried to walk the walk. The team I had entered was
serious about their play, deeply devoted to the game and their families’
budding youth that would soon take to the court again.
I almost cannot wait to see the team in action. As I am standing by
the sideline in anticipation, shoulder to shoulder with the boy’s parents,
waiting for the game to begin, we turn our heads. Here they come,
their prospective handballboys and precious sons. Vidar has finished their
pregame talk and now they are walking by us as they are about to enter
the court. Rachel smacks the three first boys on their backs, “Come on
now, show some guts!” Unruffled, almost unaware of Rachel’s kind slaps,
the boys compete in looking focused, cool, and careless. Their impression
management looks exhausting. Rachel’s own son strolls casually by. She
smacks him on his back and rolls her eyes, like “Oh my god!” before she
leans toward me, “I mean, he is so absurdly apathetic [giddaløs]. I am
trying to tell him. He needs to show some guts, you know. I sent him a
text message last evening. ‘You got to show them who’s best, give a 120
percent effort, show some guts!’” We all laugh to Rachel before we turn
to watch the closing minutes of our club’s girl team of the same age. The
contrast to the careless boys could not be starker. Perhaps game play will
transform the boys’ act too?
Any immediate answer to the question of gestural transformation will
have to wait. While the boys keep their hunched backs, they take the field,
hustle hard and win. Vidar greets me as they rush off the court and as we
let the players pass he turns and, quietly, tells me that “it is not of the best
of quality.” I am slightly puzzled by his performative, but I do not know
if he is testing me. So I insist on a couple of moments of great play that
I have memorized. Vidar does agree with me, but there is no time for
savoring. They all have to scurry along, as the next game will soon start
at another arena entirely. Vidar has to run along to manage the first-string
team, now. “Come along; join me in the locker room.” Perhaps the play
of seriousness comes off differently with the first-string boys?
5 THROWING LIKE A HANDBALLBOY … 149
After knocking on a couple of doors, Vidar and I find the noise of the
boys in locker room F, way down the corridor. As we break-in, we are
greeted by the soothing sounds of the Back Street Boys. “Tell me why.
Ain’t nothin’ but a heartache. Tell me why. Ain’t nothin’ but a mistake.
Tell me why. I never want to hear you say, I want it that way.” The team is
having one of their enchanted moments of bromance and restitution. The
boys are singing along. Most of them are laying on floor, with their legs
elevated and resting on the benches. A couple of second-string boys have
managed to out-hustle Vidar and me. They are already dressed in civilian
clothes and now seated together in the far end corner of the room. The
first-string players more or less occupy the whole floor as they are laid out
like sardines in a can, every other boy with their feet on the same bench.
The shorter boys touching at their cheek, the taller boys touching at their
shoulders. The room is hot and reeks of sweaty bodies, old socks, and a
mix of grapes, bananas, and grip resin. A ball is immediately thrown our
way as we enter. Vidar’s arrival is expected and the boys’ welcome equally
so. Vidar catches it with ease and skip hops his way into the heart of the
team. I stay by the door, keeping a small crack to let some of the cold
fresh air from the hallway enter the dense room.
The boys are commanded out into the hallway to rewarm their legs.
They are tired, so it does not take long before they return. By the time
they have finished their warm ups, only a measly couple of minutes
remain before game time. Yet, this is not Vidar’s first tournament. With
a calm confidence, he uses his seconds wisely in talking, tactic-ing, and
motivating his players. Vidar has done his homework. He knows a lot
about his opponent, their key players, how to best handle their strengths
and how to best allow his own team to do what they are best at. With
only seconds left of the warm ups, the boys settle down. The door
is closed and the window-less room returns to its tropical self. The
only light that is shining on the boys that are warmed up and primed
for action, is electric. The busy, almost chaotic locker room, that only
minutes ago was almost impenetrable, has settled in orderly fashion. All
the bags are packed and the boys are in equal colors, team jerseys and
shorts. Vidar has linked his IPhone to their boombox. “Ok guys!” He
claps his hands together and leans his back toward the locker room wall.
During the next 3 minutes, the boys are quiet, but the locker room is
full of sound. The clear break in action, the stark difference from just a
minute ago and the ways in which our focus has turned from mist to
crystal—gives me the goosebumps. The boombox streams the sounds
150 T. B. BROCH
of Hollywood. A husky male voice, his theatrically varied intonation,

whispers and thunders with sincerity and rage between the naked walls.
To a mellow orchestral, the vocal of Oliver Stone’s (1999) character Tony
D’Amato, from Any Given Sunday, accentuates Vidar’s final thoughts on
the game. D’Amato and Vidar do their best to convince their athletes to
fight their way to victory, one inch at a time:
I don’t know what to say, really. Three minutes till the biggest battle of
our professional lives all comes down to today. Now either we heal as a
team or we’re gonna crumble, inch by inch, play by play, ‘til we’re finished.
We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me. And, we can stay here –
get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light.
We can climb outta hell, one inch at a time. Now, I can’t do it for you.
I’m too old… You know, when you get old in life things get taken from
you… You find out life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in
either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small – I mean,
one-half a step too late, or too early, and you don’t quite make it. One-
half second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inches we
need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every
minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we
tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw
with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all
those inches, that’s gonna make the fucking difference between winning
and losing! Between living and dying! I’ll tell you this, in any fight it’s
the guy who is willing to die who is gonna win that inch. And I know if
I’m gonna have any life anymore, it’s because I’m still willin’ to fight and
die for that inch. Because that’s what livin’ is! The six inches in front of
your face! Now I can’t make you do it. You’ve got to look at the guy next
to you, look into his eyes. Now I think ya going to see a guy who will go
that inch with you. You’re gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for
this team, because he knows when it comes down to it you’re gonna do
the same for him. That’s a team, gentlemen, and either, we heal, now, as
a team, or we will die as individuals. That’s football guys. That’s all it is.
Now, what are you gonna do!
Sport movies are interpretive accounts joining social life and sport
myths (Dahlén, 2008, p. 132). So are youth sports. At D’Amato’s
request, “Now, what are you gonna do?” the handballboys, along with
the footballers, get to their feet, clap their hands and holler. The team has
seen the movie. They know the act. In Stone using of American football
to reflect on society, Al Pacino plays the aging coach, Tony D’Amato,
struggling to manage his team’s relational conflicts, organizational

demands of success and, at the same time, resolve his own existential ques-
tions. Stone’s register of characters paints, in glaring colors, the football
player as a contemporary gladiator, the team owner as an achievement-
oriented beast, at the heart of a nation infected by materialism. Athletes
sacrifice their bodies for economic gains and play hard in times of con-
tract renewal. Severe injuries steep a game of grunts and growls. Despite
all the forces pushing and pulling on the coach and his team, D’Amato
manages to pull it all together with a pregame speech that speaks to the
many existential and moral dilemmas of the movie. Standing with his back
against the wall, in front of his kneeled down, seated, and listening play-
ers, D’Amato preaches solidarity in effort, in sport, and in social life. Raw
talent will eventually replace aging knowledge. Social power is a constant
and poisoning threat to empathy. Solidarity can amend and embrace these
forces. At the vortex of power relations, possible solidarity and individual
interests, D’Amato de-fuses sacrificial play from material greed. He re-
fuses it with solidarity. We can fight our way back into the light. Heal,
now, as a team, or die as individuals. Its echo in the Norwegian sport
hall is forceful, aggressive, yet remorseful of loss and with hopes of col-
lective repair. As the speech ends, as the footballers agree to solidarity in
toughness and get on their feet, Vidar and his handballboys put Stone’s
narrative into their own action. As a stark split between warm ups and the
game, but also as an enchanted gateway to the many deep meanings of
their play. Vidar attempts to guide his boys in cultural mastery, in putting
culture into action. They too have to get on their feet to perform the
story. As we leave the locker room, I catch a glimpse of Vidar’s back as
he joins his coach colleagues and his boys at the end of the dimly lit hall-
way tunnel, looking into the court lights. I turn, rush up to the stance
and take seat with the parents. Just in time. The first-stringers enter the
court, back hunched, surrounded by an aura of determination in play.
One thing is for sure, they do not radiate with “sport joy,” at all. At
least nothing that can resemble a handballgirl’s smile. Varg looks flat out
miserable. I guess they are just being cool and concerted. They move
their bodies confidently slow, even more so than the second-string team.
In fact, their movements appear slower than they should, slower than
what would normally be game-efficient. Yet, their use of time and space,
rambling sideways along the defense, an act that surely will be penalized
when they grow older and meet confident rivals, works out perfect. They
are out-cooling their enemy and, at the same time, buying time to figure
152 T. B. BROCH
out their options on the attack. Their imaginative play on offense is quite
smart. The ways in which they seem unaffected by it all, careless about
their opposition, leaves plenty of room to excel in short and surprising
spurts of energy. With a bang. It is also quite humiliating to be beaten by
a team that, seemingly, does not need to make an effort, does not need to
care about their play. They give off the impression of being just that much
superior. On defense, now that is something else. They are much harder
on their opponent than the second-string team was. Their collective play,
rhythms that match, allows them to use their bigger size and weight to
stop their contestants. The bench that was only occupied by Vidar and
substitutes when the second-string team was playing, is now packed full.
Two assistant coaches have joined him. The three best players from the
second-string team are on the bench and the little brother of a second-
string player, their team mascot has joined them. They are all crammed
together on the little wooden bench.
The game waves back and forth, and, in the end we are crowned cham-
pions. Varg is awarded Most Valuable Player and for the first time, the
audience gets to see him smile. The boys rush off the court as their girl
peers of the same age, and from the same club, are about to play their
final. Instead of a bunch of hunched-backed teenage boys, these girls carry
their backs straight. In contrast, they reiterate a performative discipline,
that must hold to a quite different code than the boys. They look sharp.
A few of the boys’ parents remain seated to watch the girls. “Are they
wearing tights? It looks like their wearing tights,” one of the dads asks,
slightly puzzled as the standard handball attire is composed of a formless
jersey and an equally formless pair of shorts. “No, they buy their shorts
extra-small and then they fold and pull them so it looks like a pair of
tights, pull them way up there,” a mother laughs. This is nothing like the
boys, most of whom looked like have requested shorts one size too big.
While the boys rambled sideways, these girls perform like darts. The only
part of their attire that is not pinned down or pulled tight is the ponytail.
Like the boys’ loose outfit, the girls’ waving ponytails accentuates the play
rhythms, always a split second behind the rest of the corporal act. Even-
tually, the final whistle blow of the tournament sounds. The medals are
brought onto the court and the different gold, silver, and bronze winners
of various ages are called on through the speaker system in the arena.
Like an inverted reappearance of “the origin of humans,” the ape-to-man
evolution strip. First comes the 13-year-old boys reentering the court in
slow sprints and seemingly good spirits—smiling as they are awarded their
medals. Then the 14-year-old boys come slowly jogging, before, at the
end of the day, the 15-year-old boys walk nonchalantly back on to the
court to pick up their medals and a blue T-shirt with the print reading
“Champion.” Does the magnitude of competition arch the backs of Nor-
wegian girls, but strip the boys of their good spirits, smiles, and arched
backs?
Reimmersion in Youth: Teens and Parents

in Dreaming Disarray
As I approach the arena there is a group of young boys clogging the
entrance, goofing around, and chatting. Recognizing that it is my team
of boys, I greet them and they turn around. Vidar is there too, I had
not noticed. His young age, 175 cm (5 ft 8 in) tall and skinny body,
hooded jumper, his hunched back, makes him difficult to separate from
his boys. He is one of them. They keep at discussing who is the better
Premier League team; if the Spanish soccer league is better than the Ital-
ian. “Trygve, Real Madrid or Barcelona?” Ali asks. “Anything else than
Italian soccer, yeah, and Arsenal,” I laugh to Vidar. Vidar loves the Gun-
ners, passionately, and will not hesitate telling the boys why Arsenal is
better than everyone else is. By the looks of it, he also takes it person-
ally if his beloved team loses or is offended. They all do, at least at the
face of it all. Peter, who is also a soccer player, shares his concern that
handball is by his soccer buddies considered “a girl sport.”—“WHAT!
No way dude. You should let them come try out for handball !” responds
the crowd and laughingly settles, “They’ll go running home immediately
after scrimmage starts!” Anders shakes his head, objecting “Soccer players
are hell-a-tuff ! They got spikes on their cleats” but Vidar interrupts the
discussion and lays down the law, “There is hardly any physical contact in
soccer – soccer is a sport for chickens! End of discussion.” Anders clearly
disagrees, but the discussion is over. It is time to work out.
“Come on Per!” a mother hollers from the stance. “Don’t finish last!”
I walk over to introduce myself and to get to know this enthused woman.
“He is going to be mad at me, Per, he hates it when I do that” she
admits, but wonders if I have seen their webpage. “There is a ‘best of’
compilation video where you can really see Per making his saves” Per’s
mom makes an imaginary, quite amazing save herself. “In slow motion.
It is really something. Beautiful, oh yes. The team played well that game.
It’s a shame. They lost you know. However, like the caption at the end
154 T. B. BROCH
of the movie says: ‘just a little bit better. Tighter on defense. We will
get them next time. Keep at it!’ Yes, it’s a shame, we almost won.” I
am guessing she is a goalie and when asked why she is not a part of the
coaching team. “Oh no! Well, I guess I could. I have coached a few teams
before. I have attended two coaching seminars. I know what I do and I
did coach a team together with Vidar’s mother. She is a great coach, oh
yeah, awesome. Vidar is too. He has learnt a lot from his mother. She
and I coached girls together and were pretty good. Oh yes. I told the
girls ‘pull yourself together’. I told them ‘It’s all good, rip your rivals’
shirts to shreds if you have to.’ You should have seen them, at least some
of them. They were like ‘oh, boohoo, I broke a fingernail’.” She performs
the sulking girl, then leans her head back, snorts and waves her arms in
disgust. “Ri-di-cu-lous! Handball is a contact sport! We went full force,
tackled for real. My girls just went boom, bang. Yes, I too was a goalie.
I had braces and everything. Got the ball right in the mouth. My lip, I
mean the whole lip, was stuck in the brace. We did not have a tooth guard
back then. I just spit blood and kept at it. I had to… It is quite boring
staying here, waiting for the boys to finish so we can go back home. There
is a mall just around the corner, but I am not all that into shopping.”
Vidar gives his players a breather before he directs them to the wall
bars. The practice has been pretty demanding so far. He pushes his play-
ers far harder than I would. Then again, I am not a licensed handball
coach. As they are about to climb the wall bars, the boys start a drama of
the unpleased. One of the boys jumps down from the wall bars, almost
immediately, and joins the coach as we watch the rest of them, hanging
from their arms, pulling up their legs, repeatedly. “My back hurts,” he
tells us. A couple of minutes go by and another player drops down to
join us. He takes a seat behind our backs to watch the boys that remain
hanging in the wall bars. Anders, still holding on, mumbles something
to set off an explosive response from Vidar. “Shut the hell up Anders.
Arne does not wants to be injured, he wants to be healthy.”—“Well, why
the hell is he sitting behind you smiling!” Anders cannot stay mad, at his
coach or his teammates, and giggles all the while angrily shouting back to
us. When they all drop from the wall bars to pick up their handball, no
one hurts anymore. Vidar throws a ball my way—“join in, I always do.”
We happily warm up our arms and watch the boys.
“Arne, are you still injured?”—“Yes, I am soon all well though,
the doctor says I can start playing soon.”—“Well, you are still, at this
moment, injured then, that’s my decision,” Vidar takes the matter into his
own hands—“Can’t he come along and take the penalty shots?” someone
suggests. “Do you want to Arne? You do. Ok, sure. Come along then,”
the coach ends. Trude, the teams’ volunteer physiotherapist takes over
to stretch her son. Arne is laying flat out on his back on a yoga mat
along the sidelines now. As Trude is done, Arne returns to cautious play.
As a second-string player he is on and off in his effort. As a first-string
player, he spends most of his game time on the bench. Nevertheless, he
is among the team’s most trusted penalty shooters. He therefore, quite
often, enters the game, from his cooled down position on the bench, to
shoot the penalty. A penalty shoot in handball is taken, unlike in soccer,
from an almost standstill. With one foot in front of the other, the arm,
upper body, and hip have to rotate efficiently fast and forcefully to get
some power behind the shot. Trude’s son, despite his problematic back,
is a designated penalty shooter. This makes no sense, at least not kineti-
cally. Yet, this team is made up of several, impeccable, performers. They
are highly skilled in cultural kinetics. With two teams on the court and a
third one doing jumps and strength training by the sideline, I turn to try
to motivate the team’s star-player Anders. He is doing his jumping drills.
He suddenly rolls over in pain, squirms around, clutching an allegedly
twisted ankle. As I lean in to help him, he jumps back up, smiles and
continues his jumps. “What are you, a soccer player?” I ask him. His act-
ing is soccer-flawless. “And a handball player too,” he answers cheerfully.
Finally we all take the field, playing with Vidar and his pack of boys.
For the last 20 minutes of the practice session Vidar plays hard, giving
it his all, fighting, until, suddenly, his knee caves in underneath the full
weight of his body. My heart drops. It looks awful. So many knees get
blown on the handball court and this looks like another one. I rush over.
“Vidar, are you ok?”—“It’s just my knee,” he explains calmly, yet grinding
his teeth. He amps up his voice for all to hear: “This is why we spend so
much time on strength training and injury-prevention! So that this will
not happen to you! This is why I am on the sideline and cannot play
anymore.”—“You idiot!” Pål laughs loudly in joy, “you play with us every
single session!” Indeed, a significant part of being a handballer is to play
tough, for boys and girls.
The practice ends and on our way out we are met by Trude. She has
coached several girl teams and long been around this boy team. She knows
a thing or two about handball and is skilled in the art of sport taping. She
tells Vidar that the medical box, a huge aluminum container filled with
tape, grip resin, Band-Aids, sterile cotton, scissors, ice spray and all that
156 T. B. BROCH
he needs to keep the team rolling, is re-upped. I ask her how her son
is and Trude happily goes into detail. She tells us that she is telling her
son “if you want to do a sport in which you only use your head, pick up
chess! Then handball is probably not your thing. He is so idle. I mean,
should I pay 2000 kroner in membership fees for him to bounce the ball
along the sidelines. You really can’t say anything to these boys, at this
age. They know it all, it’s ridiculous. But, I think I am getting through
to him now. So many others have told him the same story by now. You
have to hustle hard if you are placed on the second-string team, so you
can fight your way back to the first-string team. I told him to download
that game from the last tournament, to watch it. In that game, you were
great. A real handball player. You can’t keep at it like this.” She joins the
hopelessness of communication with a teenage boy with her knowledge
of what it takes to succeed at the handball arena. It is done with such
a heartwarming resentfulness of the stereotypical teenage boy, with such
great passion for the game and love for her son, that it allows me and
Vidar to laugh happily as we exit the cultural problematics of idleness and
injuries, and enter the late August sun. Trude has played and coached
handball. She knows what it takes. In something resembling an interpre-
tive disarray, the adult and highly knowledgeable handball mothers of the
team stood sidelined to the boys’ adolescent project of on-court heroics
and off-court apathy.
In performing for each other, these boys are super cool and tough, yet
they cannot finish their coach’s prescribed exercises. They are not sup-
posed to want emotional support and succor, yet they all compete for
each other’s and their coach’s attention. The solution is fusing tough-
ness in injury and sacrifice with an adolescent challenge of authorities
and a play with the notion of injury itself. Injuries, true or false, allow
relief from practices and provide attention from those who find the per-
formance truthful or comic. However, if a boy is out of play, sidelined
by injury for an extended period, he risks losing attention altogether.
Before getting used to the sight of boys falling down, seeing Vidar’s knee
collapse, my heart jumped and my feet started racing, every time. Ulti-
mately, the effect wore off. While the young women I observed at times
heighten their call for attention by means crying, the older boys amplified
their cry by means of swagger. Their act could have fooled the sharpest
critical theorist. Wittily, Young (1980, p. 143) claimed that “most men
are by no means superior athletes, and their sporting efforts more often
display bravado than genuine skill and coordination.” Kind of right, but
she missed the drama, its force of attraction and its aim. These girls and
boys are showing us something. The girls might lose track of and immer-
sion in game play when they turn to tears. The boys, equally so, seemed
hopelessly constrained by their fusion of sacrifice, injuries, and norms of
idleness that run counter to a patriarchal sport myth. Their masculine per-
formatives of toughness in injuries is a means to get a breather from the
exercise, to challenge the authority of their coach and to receive some
subtle, yet affectionate care. It served the gender and age right substitute
for the girls’ occasional crying. Like the girl wanting psychological tap-
ing, the tough boy wants affectionate physiotherapy and social attention.
These are cultural means to shape social life and materialities (Winnicott,
1971/2005). Whether tears and sprained ankles can be trusted or not, is
really not the issue. These acts show how sports are spaces for interpretive
immersion in youth—for adults and children alike. Codes, cues, and clues
are projected and read as youth and adults maneuver the affective possi-
bilities and limits of organized play. In an imaginative confusion, young
and old reached for myth, narratives and codes in trying to understand
what was really going on and, at the same time, to shield their meaningful
selves and others from the pains of failure. Playing tough through injury
and sacrifice kept notions of passivity and selfishness at bay.
The boys were understood by parents and coaches as transitioning into
adulthood. We could see it as we were standing, or hanging, outside its
gates. The boys are joking around as they wait to leave for the tourna-
ment, together in a minibus. A couple meters to their side stand their
parents, joking and chatting too. Some are waiting to wave their sons
adieu and some will come along in their own cars to watch the first-string
team play. The small bus arrives and the boys rush to cram into the vehi-
cle competing for the better spots. Philip arrives a minute too late and
has to take the seat in front with the driver. Even worse, from there his
mother, and the rest of us, can clearly see him through the front win-
dow. Philip’s mom blows him a kiss, like a butterfly floating all the way
across from the small parking lot. She smiles and laughs at her son as he
does his best not to see the gesture. “Thanks mom!” I word what we all
believe he is thinking. “He smiled carefully back at me, didn’t he,” his
mother chuckles. “The boys are so happy for attention, hugs and kisses
when they have done well,” Trude tells as she smiles, almost closes her
eyes, raps her arms around her body to tilt back and forth in a snuggling
swing. “When they are doing well they are so grateful for the attention.
HOWEVER, when they lose and are upset, I tell you, that’s a different
158 T. B. BROCH
story. If we try to comfort them!” She thrusts her arms in front of her
torso, with her wrists bent back, showing an imaginary mother away. In
the transition between boyhood and maturity, boys and mother audiences
tried to strike the right interpretive cord.
Buses and cars parked, we enter the huge arena where Larvik, the best
Norwegian women elite team plays their home games. Vidar tells us we
have to move along. Jan, a young man about the same age as Vidar has
joined the team to help with the workload of coaching the boys. Perhaps
inspired by being at Larvik’s arena and knowing how confident the boys
are in their own skills, Jan tells them that Larvik’s women team is a good
example of what they have come here to do. “They are regarded as the best
team in all the matches they play in the Norwegian elite league. Always
being a favorite, that’s a lot of pressure, it makes it hard to succeed. But,
they always sweep the floor clean, they crush all adversaries. That’s how
we must play. That’s the attitude and mindset we need. Larvik is a great
example.” Norwegian elite female handballers have for quite some time
now served as exemplary models for both girls and boys (Broch, 1995;
Kristiansen & Broch, 2013). The coach never mentions that Larvik is an
elite women team. It is tacit knowledge. Vidar pushes the play button and
the speech rumbles. Per looks anxious, seated almost “alone” in the nar-
row locker room packed with bodies. His shoulders high and head tilted,
looking like he cannot wait until the game begins, to escape. Possibili-
ties for identification with the speech is constantly threatened. Yet, if it
achieves an appearance of truth, if the boys allow the pregame ritual to
have implications on their interactional chains and emotional game energy
(Collins, 2004), the ritual transcends routine and sparks what Gmelch
(1971/2004) defined as sport magic. A space of enchantment and a gate-
way to flow. The speech provides seconds and minutes, irrespective of
discontent or devotion, in which involved actors can sense the pressures
of solidarity in the feeling rules of handball toughness.1 Whether repre-
sented by the national women handball team or coach D’Amato does not
seem to be all that relevant. This is what it takes to perform the game.
“Take off your jumper Arne!” We are well into the game by now and
finally Arne, with his bad back, gets a try. One player leaves the court
and Arne enters. Full of anticipation, slightly cooled off and just a little
bit too hotheaded. As Arne tries to enter the rhythm of his team and,
at the same time, stand out and prove himself—he is quickly awarded a
two-minute minor penalty and has to take a seat again. Arne returns frus-
trated with big red and watery eyes. My heart drops, “It is ok Arne, you
did not do anything wrong, it is the referees making the mistake.” I try
to ease him knowing that it is only possible to emulate a partial truth.
Arne, his team, the opposition, and the referee are all playing together
in a social life that is impossible to fully master at Any Given Sunday.
One major reason for this is that sports are both an institutional and a
social performance. Fitting into the rhythm of the team is also about sep-
arating from another chain of relations. Worded or not, being tough in
competition allows for the caring and affectionate hug of separation from
their mothers. Comfort in failure is not welcome. Contrary to the Mehi-
naku (Gregor, 1977), where parents dramatized resentment for the loser,
the Norwegian boys are surrounded by caring mothers with vast handball
capital and thus need to play injured and condemn cowardice themselves.
This is a deep play with myths of adolescence.
Agency and Choreography: Carving Out Stages

for Serious Play
A second-string player arrives late for practice. He does not bother to
show the effort of running onto the court either. Nonchalantly, still wear-
ing his headphones, Falk enters the circle of guys that are now surround-
ing Vidar. “You God dammed idiot, what the hell!” Vidar yells. “Take
off them head phones! Putt them in your bag. RUN! And, when you
come back. Do 30, no 40 pushups, 30 for arriving late and 10 for wear-
ing those stupid headphones!” Falk is totally at ease, replying calmly to
every directive and likely punishment Vidar is dishing out, “sure, ok, no
sweat.” I guess Vidar is uncomfortable yelling at one guy when the rest
of the team is behaving. He moves on to praise them for their serious
attitude. There are many that are fighting for a spot on the first-string
team now, and there is a lot of effort, he states. “Yes, of course, there
are a couple of players that I have a spot for already, that I am going
to bring with me on the first-string team, but the rest of the spots are
up for grabs,” Vidar tells in all honesty. “In this document,” he lingers,
“you will find all matters concerning our squad. This is us.” Vidar holds
up a 20-page document. It is comprised of a club logo, a team motto,
and several pages of animated play tactics. On page two, in bold letters, it
says “Our assignment” followed by “INCH BY INCH” and a headshot of
the actor Al Pacino. “What is Inches?” Vidar asks his players. His concern
is not about Norwegian boys’ metric-system dissonance. One boy raises
his hand and replies: “Its dealing with one task at a time, and solving
160 T. B. BROCH
it. It’s about doing things right, with max effort.” As a team motto, fit-
ting repute, and inspiring resource for styles of play, assessments like this
occurred on several occasions throughout the season. However, it seemed
as some of the boys, the second-string player Falk, in particular, was not
getting the message straight. Fair enough, neither were all the first-string
players all the time.
Despite the use of speech by the first-string team, the performance has
staggered. Returning to the locker room, the mood is terrible. It seems
as if the power of the speech has worn off and the question if we actually
need it has risen. “This is not the type of game play we are known for,
slow,” Vidar shakes his heads. Assistant coach Jan jumps in and tries to
explain that “You have to take the field without empathy, without feel-
ings for your foes. If the speech does not mean anything to you, if you
do not get its message, there is no use to it. I get goosebumps when I
listen to it. If you don’t, it might not be useful.”—“If you are not will-
ing to sacrifice yourself for the guy next to you, bleed for your team and
jersey, if you don’t get it, there is no use in it,” Vidar agrees, “Now, what
are you gonna do? Are we gonna continue?” “Yes,” some of the boys
quietly, shamefully respond. “What! I can’t hear you!”—“YES!” the boys
roar back. “If we are using the speech, we have to bring its energy onto
the court. If an attacker jukes past our number two backcourt player the
winger has to step up and take the bang. Step up even though it hurts,”
Jan tells his boys and fuses the football speech as tightly as he can to the
game of handball. In an excited voice and with a handball dance-move, in
which he takes the important step forward instead of remaining passive,
he talks and walks the speech into action. “The speech is not, it cannot be
a meaningless routine,” Vidar ends. He is trying to avoid a disenchanted
and mechanical game that to the practice theorist might sound like the
rational thing to go for. To Vidar and Jan, that would simply be a game
stripped of meaningful play.
The speech is best applied directly before game start. We have seen it
with our own eyes. This will position the players in the performance when
play starts. If the players are kept waiting, the power of the ritual wears
off. Attention has to be given to the synchronization of game start and
the staging of ritual climax. As the next game dawns, we have a plan.
Vidar turns toward me and asks me to “check the time?” I vanish from
the locker room door, to the court. I return, to show him two raised
fingers, miming “Two minutes.” Vidar, without any recognizable inter-
ruption from his prompter cuing him in, wraps up his pregame talk and
presses the play button. We wait, clap, and cheer for a couple of seconds
“Come on guys!” we urge each other as we get on our feet “Bring it
onto the field, bring this on to the field!” And we do. The global nar-
rative enters the Norwegian court. Yet, the boys meet their match. In a
furious battle, fueled by a raging parent-audience, our first-string team
loses their first game in a long time. While the speech could open up a
gateway to enchanted play and the leeway to bring its energy onto the
court, the team could not control the social forces that awaited them.
By drawing on a narrative that could condense and elaborate the exis-
tential gravity of his handball play, Vidar evoked an aesthetic appreciation
and social psychoanalysis of his team’s hierarchy. This process of trans-
ference allowed us to feel how the binary of play and seriousness drew
force from the Hollywood narrative of toughness. Ideas about serious-
ness guided when and where the speech was to be staged, who were
allowed to try to hinge onto its iconic flow and how it should thusly
affect action. When the first-string boys misbehaved, Vidar and parents
quickly deemed their behavior as a much-needed relief from the con-
straints of social life through play. They were simply having fun and it
should be allowed since they were teenagers trying to be serious both in
sports and at school. When second-string boys misbehaved, it was read as
a reification of their lack of seriousness and their lack of devotion to the
sport play. All were always welcomed, but in serious business, first-string
attendance was mandatory. At practices before important games, the team
was divided into two. Except once, important games were always first-
string games. Those playing the serious game trained in solitude under
the focused attention of the head coach. The action was debated. Skill-
based stratification should thus not be misunderstood as a lack of or as
muting democratic values, but as at the heart of any sport team. Analyses
of solidarity and conflict arose regularly in the form of discursive debates
and in aesthetic renditions of social life.
More frustrating, the second-string players tended to resign and per-
form worse than they were capable of. As I was often designated to train-
ing the second-string team, on the opposite side of the court from where
the first string exercised, I found it almost impossible to get the second-
string boys to function as a team seriously devoted to drills and exercise.
When one player dropped his level of playing, others often followed. As
I tried to motivate one player to focus on a specific shooting technique,
in refusing to mind the net properly Espen, could ruin any attempt at
raising the bar. When Vidar divided his team before “important games,”
162 T. B. BROCH
the players that swayed between the sacred and the polluted sides (Smith,
1999) of seriousness and play were not only out of place corporally and
spatially, but also mentally. Philip would start out with much poise and
effort, yet in between the drills, he would stand gazing across the court
at the aura of the first-string team, with eyes red and watery. “Are you
ok, Philip, I totally get it, it’s ok to be upset.”—“Naw man, I am ok,”
Philip quietly answered in a cool manner. Picking up his ball, taking three
steps and firing a shot five meters away from the defense. Without any of
the passes that the drill is composed of. Without letting anyone join in on
the attack. I stretch my arms out in hopelessness. Now he is spoiling it
for us all. Yet, the ball goes in. It is a goal. Philip stretches his arms out.
Pointing toward the goal. No words needed, “look, it went in.” “Espen is
not paying attention,” I despair—“And…that’s why I am shooting from
here.” All the goalie wants to do is to play defense. They do this all the
time. When the first-string team is winning by a comfortable margin, and
that happens a lot, they rotate their players into inappropriate positions.
As was the case in the girl team, this can be done to sincerely practice
versatility. The boys do it to bolster their own identity as superior in play.
Whenever a boy that is not a goalie is allowed to mind the net, and does
so successfully against an inferior rival, the boys holler, cheer, laugh, and
high five. I have seen it so many times. As a last resort, I tape my fingers
and join the play. Only to find the goalie Espen has joined the attack,
looking like a football linesman playing wide receiver, way out of place
and rhythms.
The group’s schema (Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2003) cut a welcoming
and democratic practice in two. First-string action was a business of
meritocracy open to all who were serious. At times relieved by play.
Second-string action was assigned to play and democratic inclusion. At
times amped up by imitating seriousness. This can help us understand
why the pregame ritual was only seen once with the second-string team.
When Vidar and a couple of first-string boys arrived from another victory,
another one of those typical second-string crises occurs. The goalie has
not arrived on time and no one has heard from him. Slacker. One of
the first-string players, then another, none of them goalies, smilingly
volunteers to mind the net. Vidar shakes his head and directs the boys
to complete their warm ups. They joke around and laugh. They look
relaxed. The mood is usually less intense when the second team is play-
ing. And it is here, just before game starts, that Al Pacino joins us. This
time, with a smirk on his face. Vidar is smiling, quietly miming, at times
caricaturing D’Amato as he echoes him word for word. Second-stringer

Falk joins in as well to exaggerate the speech act with a grin of admiration
and satire all at once.
Like any narrative needs its archetypes, villains, heroes, and tricksters,
so does broad social life and local sport life too.2 Falk, the boy with
headphones still on during practice, was one of two designated clowns
on the team. A couple of weeks after the headphone incident and Vidar’s
push-ups intervention, Falk returned to practice in a pair of worn-out
Nikes. “My indoor shoes are being prepared with new and specialized
soles,” Falk tells us running idly by in his worn-out dirty shoes. His
walk is hyper-cool. He barely moves forward and so evokes the adult’s
laughter. “Cool Falk with the headphones,” I smile to Vidar—“You were
there weren’t you Trygve, serious guy, what a character, man.” We laugh
as he passes us, almost tripping himself up as he tries to manage the ball,
his legs, and the game’s rhythms. But, Falk is not fooling around today.
He pounds the ball into the net, repeatedly, with all the effort and force
he can muster. “WOW, Falk is looking sharp today,” Trude notes as
she arrives late. I tell her about his worn-out shoes and suggest that he
might just keep them. Falk keeps at it. He is 180 cm tall, heavy, strong,
and has no visible fear of contact. His shot is not technically sharp and
smooth, but what he lacks in skills, he makes up for in effort. “You are
rocking out today Falk,” I tell him, “Maybe you should just keep your
old shoes.”—“Yeah, they feel really good. About eight years old and fits
like a pair of gloves!” smiles the boy that lives on the very other side of
town, but still makes it all the way to practice. About at the same time as
Falk is flying back and forth across the city to play, I am an active player
myself, on a team that also has its own clown. This clown is kind of
like Falk, unrefined in his moves, tons of effort and a boyish, quick, and
sophisticated humoristic twist on our team’s social life. I really treasured
his company, but was very puzzled as I drove home from a game with his
best friend. Our clown called us up. He was upset because he thought
he had done a great first half but was still benched throughout most of
the second half. I was expecting a clever remark but he was just sad. It
suddenly occurred to me that this clown and perhaps Falk as well did not
spend all those hours in the arena, driving back and forth to games, only
to be clowns. Perhaps they did not only play sports to be part of a team,
part of a group seemingly playing together, but doing various businesses.
Possibly, they also wanted to play serious.
164 T. B. BROCH
The speech produces a vast array of possible flows. Its meaning is con-
tingent on situation, social composition, and codes used to filter its read-
ing. Performatives do run parallel and counter to the grand narrative to
create breaches and disruptions. As a second-string act, the speech sheds
light on sports joy and masculinity. Its misuse showed how boys in a Nor-
wegian democratic and inclusive culture of sameness were allowed to play,
yet barred from seriousness. Felicity, the amount of power play that can
be revealed, is telling of why the unauthorized performance turned the-
atre. It shows us the very rich and deep meanings of the sad clown. It is a
fine line between portraying confident resolve and being ridiculed for this
grit that has failed within a context bolstered by the play of seriousness.
After the comic pregame ritual, we take to the field laughing, and con-
tinue to do so throughout the game. The supposedly best players, just
arrived from the first-string victory, make out the starting lineup. They
laugh and smile. They are way superior to their opposition. They know
who is best and they show us that they know. Halfway into the first period,
Vidar starts making changes. He pulls all the first-string players at once
and lets the second-string boys have a go at it. They are more evenly
matched with their opponent. But, also they are better than today’s rival.
“Man it is fun to play these games” a first-string player tells us on the
bench, enjoying every second. The bench cheers and laughs as Falk enters
the game with his signature Pinocchio-style moves, barely hanging on to
the court, as if it is tilted. The bench explodes as he scores and passes
by us with something resembling a river-dance step. Ali, the team’s sec-
ond clown, is also playing today. Also he is doing good. They are nei-
ther clowns because they lack effort nor because their teammates have no
respect for them.
The very last fifteen minutes of the game is dedicated to something
resembling ideal-typical play, creative chaos. A complete ridicule of the
game, of their opponents, of handball and the idea of team sports itself.
The second-string goalie is relieved from minding the net. First-string
players take turns asking for opportunities to play at weird positions that
they do not fully master. What are they mastering then? They are hav-
ing a great time. Falk is encouraged to try an underarm shoot. “Falk is a
warrior,” first-stringer Henrik tells his teammates and Falk has been noth-
ing less. “He is totally mad!” the squad’s best pivot, Eivind, responds. “I
would not attack anywhere near Falk,” I laugh—“Me neither,” Eivind
replies sincerely. Falk is a split second late in many moves, but hustles
hard. Ali on the other hand really impresses me. He has got a quick step
and a decent shot, but is just a little bit too cautious. I tell him and
he responds like he usually does, in a whiny voice of resignation “Yes, I
know.” Eventually, Ali asks to get a try minding the net. Falk and Ali are
team clowns. This is the act they receive the most attention and praise
for by their audience. These characters of the team narrative is of course
not written in stone. Mobility between the second and the first-string
team is a mythical threat to the first-string boys, a liminal stage for the
second-best athletes, and a narrative with real wishes and opportunities
for clowns, pawns, and the parents who try to cheer their sons to up
their effort. Clowns are, at times, warriors and serious athletes. But, the
cultural archetypes are difficult to undo when a narrative future is being
written. In numerous forms of flow, clowns, heroes, and villains take the
field. In the midst of it all, after 45 minutes keeping the bench warm,
little Øystein enters the court at his pivot position. But, the game has
turned all play and no game. Those trained in assisting the pivot have all
left for other positions. Øystein at his pivot position, in the very center of
the formation, is still all alone among his peers.
When the tables were turned, at a first-string game, Ali asked Vidar if he
could coach the team. Vidar waved him off and left us in the locker room.
Only some of the boys and I left behind, Ali got to his feet, stretched his
back, stuck out his chest to wave his index finger at us “That’s a team
gentlemen, and either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals.
That’s football guys. We play handball! Trygve, I think I should write
my own speech!” he twinkles “You know what, I think you are right.”
In Ali’s poetics, domination and solidarity are never linear. Indeed, some
poets are more refined than others, but we are all able to see, able to vent,
recalibrate felicity and rejoin the play. Ali kept calling his coach Shaggy,
the skinny and ungroomed Hanna Barbera character of Scooby Doo, to
Vidar’s discontent. “Shut the hell up and leave the practice!”—“You are
joking right!” Ali angrily stood up to his coach again, before he sat back
down. Vidar, having other concerns, turned to ask why the attack was
lagging. “Because I was not playing this weekend,” Ali responds and the
little goalie Espen takes his cue, “Its because I had to play goalie and were
not allowed to join the attack!” Vidar resigns and starts talking soccer.
The second-string boys were not only designated to, but could wield the
group schema turning Vidar’s seriousness into play. Immersion in various
iconic flows can run parallel, counter and at times do collide to explode
any chance of felicity.
166 T. B. BROCH
The Size of a Handballboy: Corporal Materiality

and Meaning
It is time for the 2012 battle of the cities, or the city-team-tournament as
it is called, a national championship in which a chosen few of the countries
thought-to-be-best players are picked to represent the various major cities
of Norway, the city they live in or a city close by. Nine players from our
team make it. Not only into the tournament, but to the very final. The
boys’ and girls’ game is televised and the coach of the national team of
boys aged 15 is asked what he is looking for as he is scouting talent. “I
try to look into the crystal bowl and ask myself which of these boys that
can become international stars in about 8 to 10 years. What I look for are
those boys with extreme qualities, with that little extra.” What are those
qualities, the reporter asks. “It can be physical predispositions, it can be
that you are tall, that you have an extreme shot, but it can also be that
guy with a winning mentality, that will go to war on defense. [That guy]
can be the x-factor we are looking for.” The scout has a culturally trained
eye, the objective capacity to look into the crystal ball and determine who
will be the better players a decade later. Admittedly, his metaphors make
him a reflective scout that can also think ironically about the impossible
task of an objective talent detection. Yet, he is not a paid shaman, or is
he? His criteria, in a televised summary, concern the materiality of physical
predispositions and morals. The first criteria seems highly tangible. The
second criteria is arguably more elusive. Together however, they hold the
narrative sway to convince us that while size matters, nature and sport
cultural nurture combines in such a way that effort can keep sport dreams
alive, regardless of boys’ genetic predispositions.
The live game commentators take over and start discussing the possi-
ble futures for these chosen few youth. From this game and into a life
among our nation’s elite handballers. “It is obviously easier for girls than
for boys,” former handballgirl-great Kjersti Grini argues, “because the
physical gap is not that big for the girls as it is for the boys. For boys,
so much happens when they turn 15, 16, 17, 18 years old – they have
to hurry turning into men first, before they can compete with the men
in the elite league,” Grini says. Girls are done growing earlier than boys.
They become adults before the boys. At a young age, girl handballers
often physically outplay their boy peers. In today’s boy handball game
however, there is a small center backcourt player that steals the show,
scoring eight goals. “He is not among the bigger players and there are a
lot of big guys here, even though they are only 15 years old.” Like Thor
Aas—201 cm—“tries to keep the ball moving. Has a long reach –he is an
adult boy. Just like Robert Hedin [at that time the coach of the national
men team] has requested. Bigger, stronger Norwegian handballmen. We
are [our national team] a little bit lighter on the weight-in than the rest
of the national teams out there,” the journalist tells the audience. While
the smaller and faster player, at the age of 15, might outrun and out-
play his same-aged taller peers, this is not what the shaman scout and his
employer in the national federation are enthralled by as they gaze at the
crystal bowl. It is not only the Norwegian men side that has strategically
tried to encourage and recruit taller and bigger bodies. The women team
started their Tall Girl Project as a result of the meager inflow of tall girls
to the national team. The project sought to combat the ways in which
tall girls either sideline themselves or are sidelined by styles of play that
prioritized high speed and few errors (Svendsen, 2015). In other words, if
you want to favor certain bodies, you also need to adapt to a certain style
of play. Grini, regardless of the size of the boys at this tournament, is not
pleased with their male style of playing. “It’s too much bouncing around,
at least for my taste.” She urges more collective actions that do not ramble
sideways along the defense. She wants concerted dart-like attacks “That’s
what we got showcased earlier, what the girls were extremely good at.”
The boys are way too individually minded for Grini’s liking. They are ball-
hogging, holding on to the ball to showcase their talent, almost to the
point of impairing the team. Meaningful materiality, the ways in which
we value corporal actions are shaped by culture. Shaman scout or objec-
tive enthusiast, journalist, or national team coach—talent is in the cultural
eye of the beholder. Gender matters. Who would have known that Kjersti
Grini was right? That about five years later a fast-paced Norwegian men’s
team, attuned to the sounds of the handballgirls’ democratic leadership,
would make their decisive international breakthrough.
Back with Vidar’s boys, Eivind’s mother joins me outside the arena,
wanting to know more about my project before the practice starts. “I
don’t really understand what you are looking for, she tells me. You see,
one thing I have been thinking about, that perhaps you can help me
fathom, is the national men team’s coach, or what he said. He said, on
national television, that his boys needed to get bigger, that they need
to gain weight, put on some muscles, you know. Young boys are watch-
ing this! My son is. Is the national coach not concerned? We often have
Anders over, and he and Eivind are like ‘god dam pumper’ every time
168 T. B. BROCH
they see a guy that looks like has been pumping weights and has a lot
of muscles. You know, Eivind he tries to put on weight. He is exercis-
ing all the time, but he can’t put on weight. He is really frustrated. It’s
not particularly healthy then, as the boys are watching their idols, hav-
ing the coach of the national team saying these things. I mean, it’s just
not healthy. Look at Anders, he is thin like a needle, but he is our best
player.” Unluckily, I cannot help Eivind’s mother, “Elite sports are not
healthy, really,” and while no one says so, the way the game script was
read in 2012, Anders will probably not make it in the elite division if he
does not put on some weight too.
The club’s senior men team is practicing as we enter the arena. We
watch the team that some of our boys, perhaps, will play on in the
future. “He is massive!”—“He is pumper!”—“Insane,” the boys are spit-
ting verbs like Gatling guns. “Shit man, Larsen has really put on weight.
He’s gotten fat!” Knut speaks with aspirations, puzzlement, and amaze-
ment of the bodies moving on the court. “You know, you need a little
bit of weight to play on that court,” I tell him, but Vidar only laughs
“Well, but you really don’t have to be fat.” From underneath of Larsen’s
shirt, we can just barely see a small belly. “Being a little bit fat is just a
strategic means to carry around the energy you need to gain some mus-
cles. It even gives you a couple of extra kilos while you are waiting,” I
laugh back. “WOW!” one of the players lets the ball rip off the crossbar
and into the net. “That’s Heidi Sundal’s son,” Vidar tells us, son of the
handballgirl-great that was part of the bronze-team of 1986. The decisive
breakthrough of women’s handball in Norway. “He has been that tall
since he was 13 years old,” Vidar tells us. “But look at the pivot! He is
massive! And Larsen is tall like a flagpole!” The boys keep at it.
“We want the smaller guys in the front. Espen, you might as well just
go over at once. Then our biggest players in the back.” The boys are
doing a team photo before the practice. Jostein, one of the taller players
pumps his chest and, like an emperor penguin, swaggers over to the boys
that are lining up. “What type of picture are we doing?” one of them asks.
“A serious one? A comic one?”—“A serious one first, straighten up your
backs, chin up. Come on,” Vidar urges. “Just like the senior men team!”
Ørn replies. For the first three seconds of my time with the team, the
boys stand still and hold their breath. “Now, let’s do one comic!” The
equipment manager, Tore, joins us as we watch the boys. There, with
all of them standing right in front of us, in three lines, the opportunity
invites us to take measure of their height and size. “Every time we return
from the summer, I am eager to see, I really hope to see that our goalie,
Espen, has grown. But he just doesn’t. You know, my son grew about 7
to 8 cm this summer. And he is going to grow even more. He is born
towards the end of the year, so he is a late bloomer,” Tore can tell us. It
is a period in the boys’ lives in which they, at least most of them, grow
and therefore “their joints are not really all that well connected,” and they
get cranky and all that too. Some of the boys’ bodies do not really hold
together as they and their parents are waiting and hoping for their boy’s
bodies to grow a little taller.
Today, it is all about the goalies. Per’s mom stretches the goalies, while
she keeps telling tales from her days as an athlete. “You know, I used to
leave practice feeling nauseous. There was no motherly love [kjære mor]
around at that time. We were pushed to the brink. Biking home, I had
to stop and vomit.” Per generates an identification in his mother, as a
handball player, as a mother and a coach. She knows that you need to
work hard, but also that you need a coach that recognizes how hard you
work. She sends me after the goalies and asks me to keep an eye on them,
push and motivate them. Only Espen, the small second-string goalie that
is usually acting up, is going full force on the speed drill today. Here he
has the advantage of a smaller and speedy body. The bigger first-string
goalies cannot match him. “What’s going on, why are you not working
out?” I ask the two big guys. “Espen is so insanely good, you know,”
they tell me. “He has crazy good technical skills,” they say. For a couple
of seconds we are quiet, neither Pål’s mother nor I answer. I really cannot
see the skills they are praising. “If he had only been as tall as me, he would
have knocked us off the first-string team, easy!” settles the two bigger first
string players. They are not alone in thinking that way. Vidar and several
parents are saying the same. If only Espen was taller, we wish Espen was
taller, he could have been great, or huge perhaps. Espen, the boy himself,
what he thinks, I am not sure. He and the other boys that have been
designated to have fun, to the unserious play on the second-string team,
often looks somewhat resigned. Today his feet are moving like sticks on
a snare drum.
Eivind arrives late for practice. But, he is excused because he is feeling
a bit under the weather. He is wearing exercise equipment, holding his
younger sister in one hand, his history homework in the other. Eivind
joins in on some of the drills, keeps an eye after his little sister, reads up
on history, and talks with whoever passes him by. Vidar stops by his boy,
comforts him too. They talk about Eivind’s experiences on the district
170 T. B. BROCH
recruit team, how he was not given a chance to prove himself. Vidar
promises the young man that he will talk with those in charge and ask
them what is going on. I sneak closer to Eivind and ask him how come.
“The coaches told us, straight from start, that they were looking for big,
heavy and strong pivots. They cherry pick the big players, regardless of
whether they are pivots or not, and made them, those tallest, play pivot! I
got almost no playing time whatsoever. There is nothing I can do about it
either, you know. It’s not my fault.” I try to ease him, but he keeps talk-
ing, almost as if I am not there. “This is nothing I have chosen, nothing
I can do about it. I can only focus on the things that I can do something
about.” On his own team, Eivind is great and large, but on the district
team he is much, much smaller. It is tempting to argue, that in sports
corporal materiality has similar implications that Latour’s (2005, pp. 70–
72) speed bumps has to a car. The materiality of the speed bump has
the agency to reduce the speed of the car and the corporal materiality of
Eivind has the potential in one situation to allow him plenty playing time
and, in another setting, reduce his promises. However, while materiality
indisputably has implications for the sport life of Eivind, it is meaning
that shapes the ways his body directs his life chances. Eivind is a perfect
fit in Vidar’s a speedy defense on which he has to cover much ground.
However, the coaches of the Federation’s talent squad are looking for a
different body that better emulates the surface of what they define as tal-
ent. What they are looking for in the crystal bowl is a tall and heavy boy
that can hold his ground in a “flat” defensive formation.
“This is where the girls comes and hurls away the boys” Vidar smiles
to me as we leave the court leading the boys into the locker room. Jørgen
asks Espen, in a friendly voice, teasing him, “why have you pulled up the
sleeves on your jersey? Anything underneath your sleeves that I should
know about? You have nothing to show me do you,” Jørgen pulls up
his own sleeves and studies his own, thin, with no muscles, upper arms,
smiling in irony. The coach grabs a bag and sits down in front of the boys
that are spread out on the benches. Falk and Ali, our two clowns, have not
cooled down after the handball scrimmage and have now wrestled their
way from the playing surface into the restroom. “What the hell are you
guys up to? Get out here. Damn!” Falk takes a seat beside the coach and
smiles. “Go sit down with the boys,” the coach demands but the boy still
smiles “I’m all good right here.” “Damn! Do as I tell you! Sit yourself
down on the bench!” The coach has been pushed to his Monday night
limit and now looks and sounds angry. With a careless face, the young
wrestler hops over to the bench where Trym and Henning are leaning
up against each other. “What the hell are you two doing!”—“Just a little
massage,” responds Trym and Henning adding more movement to their
close encounter. “What the hell! Stop it! Get your hands off each other
and sit up.” Vidar models his own body to present an idealized posture.
Moving his hand across chest and chin, the coach magically alters his body
appearance announcing that they should sit “with your backs up straight,
your chests pumped and chin up!” With a cold face, Trym and Henning
detach and arch their backs while hopelessly noting “Like a male senior
player.” Vidar looks beat. He has been trying to get the boys to listen. He
is running out of tools and fuels. Trym and Henning read Vidar’s message
through a gendered perspective in equating a proper posture to that of
the imagined senior men player. It would have been so much easier if they
knew when to be adult and when to be youth. It is not really about being
a man all the time. It is about knowing when to be one. When to be
clowns and when to be serious athletes. When to share hugs and cuddle.
When to detach and put on a serious act. If they do become elite athletes,
chances are that they will have coaches telling them to smile more, show
more sport joy. Perhaps sport psychologists will romantically tell them
that they need to excavate the childish joy they experienced starting to
play the game and that kept them playing. Vidar and his young boys are
striving to grow up and make the right choices in their myriad settings
and social lives.
Vidar makes one last try in getting to the boy. He wants to prepare
them for the upcoming game. “These guys are pumpers,” Vidar tells us
and gives us a couple of analogies to vividly paint the picture of a pre-
historic athlete lifting stones and weights to build muscles and, in the
end got so big and slow that he perished. The boys take over, turning it
into a name-dropping game. “Svein is a pumper!,” “Preben is pumper,
right!” The boys are boasting into a frenzy. Anyways, it will be fun to
play them, Vidar continues, they have “to be put to the floor. Smack
them down. They got no speed. You can tell what they are going to do
an hour ahead. He is that slow. They play stone-age handball. We have
to step up and bang them up.” With a gender perspective, Eric Ander-
son (2009; Anderson & Kian, 2012) nuanced Connell (2005) in arguing
that modernity is not simply reducible to patriarchy as ideal, cotempo-
rary masculinities also idealize an inclusive masculinity. Anderson allows
us to see, even with a gender perspective, how boys and men sanction
ways of being inclusive by knocking down old hierarchies and raising new
172 T. B. BROCH
solidarities. It is ok to be intimate. Men and boys are allowed their bro-

mance, sing alongs to the sweet sounds of the Back Street Boys, at least
sometimes. In the next moment they try to reinstate meaningful hierar-
chies by mocking undesired and outdated modes of masculine play. In
other words, boys and men are seldom reducible to the academic ideal
types that exist in the split seconds of real life, in the blink of an eye that
Henning and Trym are caring and inclusive masculinities. Boys and men,
on various occasions, fleetingly fit our academic categories that are set
in the eternity of our penciled down texts. The 23 boys, their parents,
and their young coach were both shaking their heads at the exclusive
practices of other teams and reinserting their own version. They wanted
their boys to feel like part of a family that cared for each other and that
included everyone on most occasions. They feared the days in which the
team might possibly dissolve. The boys wanted to be handballmen, but
hated the adult and large “Stone-Age-pumper masculinity” with tons of
muscles, no speed nor smarts. The boys could pump their chest and swag-
ger like emperor penguins, but enjoyed being laid out like sardines in
a can, chin to chin. Meaningful sports allow actors to transition. When
bodies intersect with various systems of meaning they become objects of
different meanings and various plausible limits. In meaning-making, we
are faced with the challenge of using past experiences to make sense of
the categorical now, and how to move onwards.
On my way out of the arena, I have to turn around to find my scarf.
I probably left it in the bleachers. But, the stance is now packed with
an audience watching our 15-year-old girls team. Many of the boys are
still around. “How are the girls doing?” I ask Arne. “They are leading
by nine against the team that won silver in the Pertille tournament last
year. They are playing awesome!” Arne is impressed. I sit down beside
coach Jan, Vidar’s colleague. Jan wonders what differences I am seeing
between the boys and the girls. It is quite difficult to observe differences
and be confident that there are gender differences, because the girls are
younger, I tell him. The girls lack some of the fundamentals that our boys
now have acquired and they struggle a little bit with their emotions, with
crying. Jan, who has trained younger boys as well, thinks this is fascinating
and recalls that “Yes, when the boys were younger, like 11-12, they used
to cry a lot too. But, when boys got older, when they reach a certain
age, they kind of leave their crying behind and grind their teeth and bite
their tongues.” Jan flexes his biceps, clenches his fists, and holds them in
front of his chest. Knut who is seated just by turns to look puzzled at us
and our curious conversation. “You know, I don’t think Knut would start
crying on the court if he got hurt today,” Jan smiles at Knut, who is now
watching us. “Well perhaps Knut, but not the other guys,” I joke and
Jan laughs—“Say what!” Knut rolls his eyes, pumps his chest “I don’t
cry, what the hell!” We joke around as the stance is electrified by girl
toughness in corporal motion and with our deep knowledge about why
the boys no longer need to cry—they just play “injured.”
Moral Guardian of His Rational Actors:

Individual Flows in Culture
I am about 15 minutes late for the workout. It is well into the season
and I am getting fed-up with unsuccessfully trying to motivate the boys
in doing their pregame warmups. I often find myself pushing them, then,
to be informed that a whole bunch have already trained with some other
team, and are probably exhausted. My loss of momentum could not have
come at a worse time. “Hey! Trygve, you are 15 minutes late!” Ali joyfully
greets me in a way to let me know that something special is going on
today. I sneak into the locker room. The lack of usual ruckus is blaring.
A sturdy woman in her 50s, a little bit shorter than me, is standing in
the middle of the locker room, eyeing me down with her hands on her
hips. Gro, the mother of our head coach Vidar, has organized the boys,
and is now telling me how she has just yelled at them for not showing up
15 minutes before they get the playing court, leaving them short of time
to do their injury-preventing warm ups. This is not a woman you want
to mess around with. “Vidar is away for three weeks, doing a coaching
seminar,” she tells us. Gro tells the boys to get moving, and they do. She
looks at her son’s work out plan and wrinkles her forehead “I can see
that Vidar’s plan will take us more than the assigned minutes, we better
get going boys! I don’t want to leave any of the components out,” she
smiles to me. “This is not your first time coaching these guys, is it?” I
ask. “Well I have coached a couple of them. Both my sons, since they
were five.” The boys have already started jogging and now pass us by as
we are standing in the hallways. I really wish I knew her secret recipe for
authority or if she could possibly prescribe some for me and, perhaps, for
her oldest son. Nevertheless, this at least gives some renewed hope in that
the anarchistic boys will actually succeed in Norwegian schools and job
markets by wisely taking the command of a woman.
174 T. B. BROCH
“I remember, when I first arrived here, people kept telling me that

Vidar was very much inspired by your way of coaching.”—“Vidar was
never really interested in defense, but he has worked up an appetite for
it by now.”—“Yeah, it’s really impressive what he has done, defensively,
with these boys.”—“That was kind of our thing, when we were coach-
ing the team before this one, that’s what we did at our last sports club.
However, as soon as we left, it all fell apart. It has to be worked at con-
tinuously you know. And he has really done that here.” The boys pass
us by again, without any complaints or foolishness. “Gro, I wonder, how
is Vidar keeping it all together? You know, he is so dedicated.”—“He is
at the arena four times a week, games in the weekends,” she says—“Yes,
weekend games with three teams !” I smile—“It is a little bit too much.
He has no time left, you know, to simply be… a boy,” Gro gives me the
looks of a slightly worried mother. “Well… Come on Trygve, I want the
boys to have straight backs and full extensions in their shoulders.” She
shows me, using Philip, looking at me to make sure I am paying atten-
tion, as the teenage boy has to do push-ups for all to watch. “Now, go
make sure the guys at the far end of the hallway are doing it right,” she
directs me. Slightly stumped by her authority I move along the long line
of quiet boys to check up on them. At the end of the row of boy bodies,
I am about to adjust Ali’s posture, only to find that Gro has tagged along
and has opened her mouth before I can word myself. But, Gro stops in
time “Sorry, you were about to say, Trygve.”—“Full arm extension Ali,”
I tell them both.
These warm ups are different from the pattern of behavior that I am
used to. I cannot help to wonder that despite the fact that Gro and her
son Vidar shared verbalized coaching philosophies, they nevertheless had
different coaching actions. Their accomplished authority was highly dis-
crepant. Gro thinks Vidar’s coaching makes him lose the childhood of
his mid-20s. To me it looks like Vidar’s surrounding coaches and parents
have carved out a stage for him to remain in childhood, playing along
with 23 boy teenagers. Here Vidar played the aging coach that was side-
lined due to severe injuries caused by dedication to the game and his
former team. He was their likeminded friend that shared concerns about
who is the better soccer team in Spain and England. He was, when his
knees would hold up, their dedicated on-court teammate when executing
drills and game simulations. The group style of Vidar’s team, his team’s
lack of the normative discipline was in many ways exotic. It neverthe-
less makes for a great example of how cultures allow us immersion and
reimmersion in multiple meaning systems. In sports, grown men and

women can remain handballboys and girls as long as they are active.
Old girls and boys can prove to us that youth is maintained by those who
discipline their bodies and allows themselves to reimmerse in youthful
play, its myths and realities of health, to guide the proper moral actions
of our upcoming teenagers. Flow not only allows for fun and felicity of
this kind. Flow is the result of performances that weave cultural patterns
and codes with specific actions. It does not result in full consensus, pre-
dictable outcomes, and the ritual becoming of an ideal type. To the best
of my knowledge, Vidar’s coaching was more or less unchallenged. If this
was a result of significant parents usually standing by his decisions is hard
to say. Undoubtedly, Gro and Vidar both had authority. They both had
disciplining effects on the boys they were coaching. They were just two
meaningful worlds apart. Vidar’s reimmersion in youth, himself being a
young man, and the landscapes of meaning he used to shape conduct,
had the disciplining implication of shaping boys into undisciplined ath-
letes. Gender matters at this point. At schools in Norway, for about two
decades, girls have outperformed boys. Girls better imitate normative dis-
cipline and are thus more often seen as socially competent and more seri-
ous in their scholastic deeds. Boys are more often labeled as hotheaded
troublemakers (Gustavsen, 2017, 2018). In Vidar’s team, the boys end-
lessly questioned authority with performatives of the teenage boy, to the
point in which Vidar at times gave up trying to communicate with them.
I cannot blame him. I certainly grew tired. I turned to see if I could pos-
sibly help the second-best players develop. Yet again, this was also the role
I was given, from the very start.
We joke our way onto the court where the girls are finishing their
workout. “Are you going to play the girls team Vidar, for scrimmage?”—
“No disrespect Trygve, but boy and girl handball are two different sports,
totally. We played a third division adult women team last year and just
crushed them.” Vidar removes his jumper and joins the boys in warm ups,
today it is an American-football hybrid, someone brought the pigskin.
“Come on guys, it is ok to use some force, let it bang a little.” The boys
do use some force, but are polite to each other, usually they are. Whenever
someone goes to the floor, a hand is offered to the hitee.
Instead of practicing what he had defined as stone-age handball, Vidar
tried to be innovative. He ends the warm ups and redirects his boys into
a defensive stand. This is not your usual Norwegian defensive stand, in
which all players (almost) stand with their heels on the six-meter line, but
176 T. B. BROCH
a formation in which the boys are shaped into a pyramid with an apex
player standing just outside the nine-meter line. “How many teams of
15 years-olds practice the 3-2-1 defense?” I am impressed by how Vidar
and his boys have, throughout the season, outmaneuvered their rivals.
They are damn good at it. “It’s us. And the other teams I have coached.
Meaning, it is me,” he laughs. This is, in fact, the team’s specialty, their
tactical mark of distinction, and so much more. Vidar has a need for
speed, both on offense and on the defense, he tells me. “But Vidar, the
handballgirls are pretty speedy now a days,” the little shrewd feminist in
me has to tease him a little more. “Perhaps they didn’t use to be, but
with all those small girls, they are literally running by the bigger Russian
women.”—“You know Trygve, I don’t watch the handballgirls, it’s a dif-
ferent ball game. Yes, they play fast now, and, by all means, I admire their
accomplishments, they have won so much. All the while, there might not
be that high a level of competition in the women’s game internationally. I
want to play handball more like hockey. Lots of tempo and many substi-
tutions. Norwegian handball is old fashion, outdated. They are not able
to modernize. I want to do just that. Of course, you cannot modern-
ize Norwegian handball with one 15-year-old boys team. Hell, I tell you
Trygve, I don’t even stand to watch the Norwegian men team either! It
is so damn slow! That guy, Mamelund, he makes me feel nauseous, I can’t
watch the way he slowly takes three steps, jumps and shoot straight at the
goalie. Mamelund dominates the Norwegian elite division, so, obviously,
he has got some skills, it is just…Of course, I am a short guy,” Vidar tells
me. In comparison, Mamelund is 1.97 cm (6 ft 6 in) and 100 kg (220 lbs)
and has played professional handball in Norway, Denmark, Germany, and
France, has 132 games and 353 goals for the Norwegian national hand-
ball boy-team. Vidar is about 175 (5 ft 8 in) and, I am guessing about
75 kg (165 lbs). I do not think Vidar knows, but his thinking about how
a handball attack should be played, is right in line with Kjersti Grinis,
the handballgirl-great. “But, I really believe,” Vidar continues, “that an
offensively minded defense, by developing the transitional game as the
defense turns to offense, that it is possible to be the best team out there,
that we can be the best defensive team in Norway.”
In Norway, sports federations make it possible that sport clubs have
an imaginable mobility. Mens handball has six levels, or divisions, ranging
from division 5 though division 1, to an elite division. A team can, theo-
retically, start in the fifth division and climb to the elite. Vidar’s deepest
wish, I would later learn, was to maintain the core of his team and play
them all the way to the elites. His speedy and offensively minded defense
could be a way to challenge what he and his boys talked about as the
inches and pounds of their massive, pumping and overweight rivals—the
body of what many others defined as an adult handballboy. Vidar thinks
differently about those weight-pumping players that so many coaches and
journalists praise for slamming the ball into the net from a distance.
Vidar’s meaningful assessment of the game script, his unconventional
reading of and shaping of different strategies of actions, are generated by
his purification of speed and agility and polluting of corporal-material size
and muscle mass. This allows him to see talent in slightly different ways
than his coaching colleagues in the handball federation. It allowed him
to objectively question the Federation’s disbelief in his best pivot Eivin-
d’s capacities because he lacked corporal size. Yes, Vidar cared for Eivind
too. But, this was the style of play that resonated with Vidar’s meaning-
ful assessment of his own corporal materiality, and, perhaps, of his two
brothers of equal height and of his mother’s assessment of handball prag-
matics.
The team’s style of play, did not take away from the cultural facts
about the handball player as tough. I tell Vidar that I’ll start writing about
the speech. His eyes squint and his forehead wrinkles. He has previously
acknowledged that the speech probably resonates differently from persons
to person. He has also expressed his concerns about the speech’s efficacy.
“This is something I started Trygve, it’s nothing the boys called for, or
something they chose. I’m not sure if it works equally efficient for every-
body, or that it works at all” – “Well, they are a bunch of diverse guys” I
ponder aloud and we both nod our heads. If Vidar had chosen D’Amato
to finish his pregame speech for him, what did he actually hear when he
listened in? “Perhaps I have used it too often, in too many games. The
idea was that it would prepare their bodies for the game. I think the speech
is just great. It includes all that is important, what it takes to do well in
all sports; team commitment, achievement through hustle, you know.” I
nod back at him and wonder carefully and critically “I kind of think about
the routine as a guy-thing; the speech, boyish movie, the coach, the boys
locker-room?”—“I guess,” he answers but pauses. He continues to pon-
der and by now I know him well enough to see that he tells me, without
saying it, that he does not totally agree with me. Vidar does not like my
reduction. “But, you know, it is the same that counts for girls too, it is
the same that is important to perform for both boys and girls. It is what’s
needed to win the game… Guy-thing,” Vidar pauses again “well, I agree
178 T. B. BROCH
that the speech is presented in a slight boyish manner, male players in the
locker-room, a dude talking, and maybe that ambiance, I guess yeah.”
Vidar repeats my words, but sees no real gender difference in the perfor-
mative feel for the game. Handball is the same for girls and boys. This
puzzles me as Vidar has told me flat out that he believes that women and
men handball are two different sports, that there is little for boys to gain
of knowledge from girl handball. Does gender difference lose its relevance
when we get down to the meaningful basics, the generative grammar, the
script of the game? Is Vidar’s understanding of gender much more simi-
lar to that of the medias presentation of men and women handball than I
had expected from his boyish coaching style.
Vidar’s nuanced reflections challenged my own use of the gender per-
spective. In many ways, he changed the course of my project. Vidar
stopped me. This would, he argued, be a premature gender analysis
detached from the meaningful binaries that he was using in understand-
ing sport competition. As an institutional performance, handball gener-
ates the legitimacy of tough and sacrificial strategies, regardless of the sex
of the actors’ bodies. Observations of girls and women, as well as on tele-
vised handball indicate likewise. What the coach implies, as I understand
him, is that both girls and boys can and have to perform toughness and
sacrifice to win games against evenly matched opponents. While what we
might hold to be Oliver Stone’s brushstrokes of hyperbolic football mas-
culinity do fascinate the boys, this figure also materializes what the boys
and their coach constantly polluted as the difficult image of the grown,
big and adult man. Vidar and his teenage boys were indeed preoccupied
with being and becoming men. However, as teenage boys, this was not a
reality that was easily attained, not always wanted, and often commented
on with much resentment. The many meaningful landscapes surrounding
them, agency and choreography among the boys and their coach, were
at times difficult to maneuver all at the same time. There were women
and girl exemplars that surrounded them as coaches and athletes. Like
in the media, women success made it important to dichotomize women
handball from men handball so that the performative transition from
boy to man would not be disenchanted. The boys were allowed inter-
pretive immersion in youth and adulthood. To make this happen, the
solution was to pollute patriarchal masculinity and make its unattainable
performance undesirable. Patriarchy was, like handballgirl Randi Gusta
proposed, signified by a “Stone-Age mentality” and materialized by the
“Stone-Age-pumper” on the handball court. Vidar and the boys were
aware of and tried to maneuver what all this broad culture, narratives and
myth, meant to being a teenage boy. They relished in its cultural per-
formance of a disciplined chaos and toughness in competition. In many
ways, the boys embodied these teenage dilemmas. Meaningful corporal-
ity made knees and heads hurt, it called for physio, but the boys had no
Band-Aids for growing pains.
Dyck (2012, p. 168) sees sports as allowing dreams to be “hitched
to demanding regimes of discipline that seek to transform aspirations
into more or less realizable ambitions.” Through the season Vidar, in
his romantic devotion to the game and his team, often arrived a little late
for practice, sometimes slightly exhausted, sometimes still drowsy after his
pre-practice power nap. I often felt a little sorry for him, or perhaps, I felt
bad that I did not help him out as much as he and his surrounding parents
thought he needed. They often questioned my stubborn sharing of time
between the girls and boys, asking if I could not prioritize the boys, just
a little bit more. Yet, Vidar was not all alone with the boys. Sometimes
a parent or two would help out. Many of them with enough handball
knowledge to give the boys a good workout. Twice, to the great joy of
Vidar, two young men in their twenties had joined the team as prospective
assistants. After about three months, they both left due to other obliga-
tions. Vidar’s dedication to his team, at his age, was impressive. Being
at the arena with Vidar, with Bjørn and Katrine in the girls’ team, all the
youth and their attentive parents, revealed the push and pull of solidarities
and conflict, dreams and realism.
Sports allow interpretive immersion in and dreaming about youth.
Youth, in this sense, is not simply a period in life that is distinguishable
by numbers. It is something that can be lost, regained, and that has spe-
cific meanings surrounding its aura. It is a time and way of being as well
as becoming (Ronglan, 2016; Trondman, 2013). The coaches and par-
ents spent time trying to guide the youth through adolescence. Parent-
ing, childhood and youth, are not biologically predetermined, but social
achievements of young and adults in concert and dissonance (Broch,
1990, 2002). This play of youth at the arena had both intended and unin-
tended consequences. Vidar tried to make the boys do injury-preventing
drills. They rejoiced in pain, hollered for all to hear. This accentuated the
toughness of handball, the toughness of the now injured Vidar that could
“no longer play.” So being, Vidar had lost part of his youth. He had lost
a dream he tried to keep, or find, or substitute. Of course, “youth” means
something different when it has been lost. Playing on a team, sacrificing
180 T. B. BROCH
for the guy next to you, making the team into a community that resem-
bles a family, has a different meaning to the one who has lost access to its
conflictual solidarity and is merely peeking in.
“We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me,” D’Amato tells us.
“And, we can stay here – get the shit kicked out of us – or we can
fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell one inch at
a time. Now, I can’t do it for you. I’m too old. I look around. I see
these young faces, and I think – I mean – I made every wrong choice a
middle-aged man can make. I, uh, I pissed away all my money, believe
it or not. I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me. And lately, I can’t
even stand the face I see in the mirror. You know, when you get old in
life things get taken from you. I mean that’s…part of life. But, you only
learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life’s this game of
inches. So is football.” The culture and performatives Vidar needed were
everywhere around him. I do not believe that he had chased away anyone
who had ever loved him, but his romantic dedication to his team of boys
was strong. Like D’Amato, his devotion to the team trumped the ratio-
nal demands of his work life. “Don’t tell my boss, ok,” he would joke.
Like D’Amato, he was too old and could only guide his boys in believ-
ing in the same solution he carved out. Any Given Sunday is not only a
glorification of masculinity, it is also an interpretive account that tries to
resolves moral questions regarding a materialism that poisons elite sport
in modernity (McDorman, Casper, Logan, & McGinley, 2006). That poi-
sons masculinities. Redemption is offered through the biography of a set
of main characters that are being destroyed by material and economic
temptations, but that, at the end, come together as D’Amato preaches
traditional American middle-class ideals, friendship, trust, and family val-
ues (ibid.). Vidar’s romantics of a handball family received a considerable
blow as the season was winding down.
Jan, who has joined Vidar in coaching the boys, has given him and the
team a real boost. But, a new situation at his job is now making it difficult
to keep at it. “My work day no longer ends a four pm, and on Fridays, we
have seminars from three and…until late. It is kind of weird, but that’s
how it is. And that makes it impossible for me to help out on Fridays.
Just impossible.” Vidar has no trouble understanding Jan’s new situation,
“the job has to come first,” he tells Jan, even though he has never said
anything, even remotely similar about his own job situation. “Yes, I mean,
that’s how it is. The job comes first,” Jan repeats himself, but still holding
on to his outspoken devotion to handball and to the boys. “We really
need to set up and sign a contract. I need a coaching contract with the
club. I cannot afford to keep at it like this. I think I have lost about two
thousand kroners already, on the very few weeks I have been here. Well,
at least 1500 kroners. Toll charges, gas, you know. Also back and forth
to the tournament last weekend. I really can’t afford it. I got rent, an
apartment. We really need to get this fixed. We should schedule a meeting
this week,” Jan ends stressing the importance of the matter. Vidar nods
his head, but I cannot help to wonder what is going on in his mind. I
have never heard him complain about expenses or hardly anything else
for that matter. “I am still motivated to continue to coach, very, but I
got to make a living you know,” Jan tells us. It is an uncontestable truth,
“that’s just how it is.” What I did not know at that time, Jan was soon to
leave the club. Vidar and the boys, perhaps, already knew or, at least could
sense it. “Think about where the boys will be in one year Vidar,” Jan tries
to change from realism to idealism and to cheer up Vidar. “Think about
all that’s going to happen. It’s going to be progress. Physically.” Vidar
nods as Jan is thinking ahead on a very enthusiastic note, yet perhaps he
is telling us, that all things come to an end. The court is vacant today
because the girl team has gone to support the club’s senior team that
is trying to advance to the elite division. “If they win the game, they
have, more or less, sealed the deal,” says Vidar. “If they do make it,” into
the elite league, “the club has to make some decisions, you know, about
how to prioritize,” I wonder. “That’s true,” Vidar says, but does not
really see this as a negative, “it simply means that they can’t afford to also
prioritize a men senior team. They simply have to wait for us – making
us the next and only reasonable, only possible men team to prioritize.”
Vidar concludes. But, Jan looks uneasy with Vidar’s thoughts. This was
not the idealism he was going for. Jan believes that it is far from “certain
that all the boys actually want to play for this club, in the lower divisions.
When they get a little older, they will start looking for elite teams to
practice with.” But Jan knows already or can at least immediately see in
Vidar that he is way out of line and tries to save the situation, again,
saying that “nothing would, of course, be cooler than if these boys had
kept at it together, all the way to the elite league. However, your oldest
son Tore, he came to this club a year ago and now he has moved on to
another team. Is that not right? He is a really good example of how these
things work, right?” Tore, who has been silent until now, speaks in a very
cautious manner, “Yes, well, nobody on this team is ready for the elite
today. But, I don’t think they want to hang around and play in the lower
182 T. B. BROCH
divisions, in about one to three years, when this all becomes a reality.” I
am standing next to Vidar, so I cannot see his face, but from the tone of
Tore’s voice, from Jan’s cautions, we are stirring some powerful emotions.
“I really think Tore’s oldest son is a good example, that our players will
start looking towards other clubs.” “Yes, but perhaps we can strike a deal
with another club,” Tore amends Jan’s argument. “That our players can
try out for an elite team, that we can be sort of like a farm-team from
which prospects are picked up by an elite team. There are several clubs
that make this work,” Tore suggests in a positive tone. But, Vidar has had
it and his voice is full of resentment and anger. “That’s no good. So, you
are going to send them to play for a team that they have no feelings for,
no emotional affiliation whatsoever. What is good, I tell you, is playing for
a club that matters to you, it’s playing with a group of guys that matters to
you.” “That’s true, but they won’t play for the other team, only practice
with them,” Tore tries to smoothen it all out. Vidar leaves us. He joins
his boys on the floor. Where he belongs. It is as if he disappears. I spent
quite some time with Vidar, I have gotten to know him a little.3 He is in
hell right now. My heart drops harder at this instance than what it now
does as his knee pops and body drops. Vidar cannot, or does not want
to play on a team himself with his knee regularly disjointed. He is young
but too old. His days as a player has been taken from him. At least this is
his narrative. There might be many reasons why Vidar wants to keep his
team. It allows him to exercise a meaningful control of their actions, it
provides him the intensified flow of belonging and reimmersion in youth.
Handball is to Vidar, what football is to D’Amato, an intensified life of
inches. Vidar plays the aging coach that struggles to manage his team’s
conflicts, cultural ideas of success and simultaneously resolve some of his
own existential questions. Vidar’s story is about a devoted coach circled
by achievement-oriented beasts in a sport nation infected by materialism.
Injuries steep his game of grunts and growls.
After a short while, Vidar returns. “Hey, don’t you want to make the
boys dance!?” Tore smiles to the head coach and asks him again. Vidar
turns toward his boys, stops their warm ups, and directs them into two
parallel lines facing us as we watch from the sidelines. “Erik! That’s not
two lines! Get in line.” Tore has to help out, yelling at the boys. “Eivind,
Ali, Andreas, get up here!” Finally, the dance can begin. Vidar points,
with tiny, almost invisible movements, with a finger, like a conductor. He
points left, up, up, left, right, down, down. He points at his boys and at
himself. The boys dance left, jump with arms raised to block an imaginary
shot, jump again, go left, right, drop to a pushup stand, up to their feet,
down again. They backpedal and move forward. Vidar is almost smiling
again but keeps his serious and strict mask while he with tiny movements
of his finger directs the boys. “Asshole! We can’t see where you are point-
ing!” Anders exclaims with the little breath he has left in his lungs. Vidar
makes his conducting slightly more visible, before he gives his boys a
breather. “God dammed sadist!” Ali laughs. Most of the boys are gasp-
ing for air, yet smiling, laughing at each other, to their coach, boasting
about how “god dammed” draining this is. Others remain quiet. Vidar
gets his boys on their feet. “Shit!”—“No!”—“What the hell”—the boys
are now not only dancing, but also singing their full vocabulary of cuss-
words as they move back and forth, jump and fall down on the court—like
determined puppets in narrative of belonging, adolescent masculinity, and
meaningful sports.
Notes
1. Rituals affirm solidarities and moralities through symbols condensing sys-
tematic binaries (Durkheim, 1912/2001). Rituals do not eliminate discon-
tent, but soothes difference by sustaining images, or the a self-portrait, of
the group (Fine, 1987; Kunda, 2006) and a common reference for further
interaction (Collins, 2004). Its meaning is situational, changes over time,
and varies by social composition (Geertz, 1973). Ritual in modernity are,
in other words, highly contingent and should be understood as a perfor-
mative accomplishment (Alexander, 2017). A successful performance not
only symbolizes a social relationship, it actualizes it (Alexander, 2004) by
making room for situational and personal variation.
2. Alexander (2010), DeLand (2018), and Hermundstad (1995).
3. Tuva Broch (2016, 2018) practices a person-centered ethnography arguing
that ethnographers should try to build thick biographic descriptions that
can reveal how persons relate to various cultural contexts. Empathy then
becomes a valuable methodical remedy in the ethnographer’s toolkit.
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Gustavsen, A. M. (2018). Kjønnsforskjeller i sosiale og skolefaglige prestasjoner
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CHAPTER 6
By Way of Conclusion: A Cultural Sociology

of Sports
This book presents an ethnographic journey into Norwegian handball. It

has also sought out the prospects of a new-Durkheimian theorizing and
confronted this approach with the most compelling intellectual alterna-
tive available, a critical sociology of sport and gender. In answering the
question how does the meaning of sport shape gender, the cultural Marx-
ist answer has been proven to be problematic. Two new viewpoints have
taken form.
First, gender is central to social life, but cultures recognize gender in
both subtly and clearly varied manners.1 Feminist ontologies have spread
globally to inspire and shape our political and personal lives. Luckily, and
despite of many backlashes, it still does in ways. We are thus challenged to
contemplate what we as scholars empirically take to be gendered power
relations and what power relations we gender by use of theory. Vitally,
an ambiguity that is one of the most exciting parts of the critical theo-
rist’s analysis often receives no genuine weight and seldom changes the
models from which this scholar depart and return. I have shown how cul-
ture structures shape gendered sport narratives through romantic, comic,
and quest genres. Codes of play and seriousness have been shown to
switch the meaningful gravity of gendered sport-interaction. If we do not
allow this knowledge to shape our studies, the questions that permit us to
advance might remain hidden. How, when and why does the second sex
become the first? When and how do agency and criticism shape sameness?
How should we balance critical deconstruction and cultural reconstruc-
tion? If iconic experiences infuse bodies with meaning, does this sensation

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_6
188 T. B. BROCH
carry outside a situation of athletic flow? In Norway, the female hand-

baller has long defined the game. The male handballer’s lack of feats and
eventual success was evaluated in light of her iconic shine. Concurrently,
sport journalists and athletes, men and women, use codes of civility and
feminism to criticize and change their sport. Reconstruction reveals, not
only of how these meaning fragments of injustice appear in sport, but
also how they are part of the empirical and patterned realities shaping
sports. Sports are alive with narratives and real wishes for a more equal
present and future for our children and adults in sport and society. Nor-
wegian team-handball makes this visible as the gender, sport, and national
identity nexus make it a point of honor to place the principle of gender
equality at the very basis of democracy. As a result, an essential question
emerged. What are sports and why are they valuable for sociologists study-
ing gender. My answer is that sports involve play, game, and performances
that shape our projects of solidarity. In sports, cultural mastery, belonging
and attraction makes this project an enchanting social drama that shapes
gender, bodies, and actions. Meaningful sports cannot be credibly retold
through the lens of inequality structures alone. Its intersecting with cul-
ture structures makes it far more complex.
Second, critical theorists see competition as the centerpiece of the
pathological sport-forms produced under capitalism.2 Sports are both
a byproduct of patriarchal capitalism and a machinery that in its own
right breeds masculine winners and feminine losers. In line with Popper’s
(1959) critique of Marx, this masterpiece makes falsification impossible.
There is no thinkable observation that can prove the critical gender per-
spective wrong as it forces its own ontology on sport. While a Popperian
logic of inquiry is problematic in the humanities, I follow Smith (2008,
p. 30) in that “a few gestures towards falsification can be useful–and curi-
ously enough, in the spirit of intellectual generosity and solidarity.” Sports
perform competition. I have shown throughout this book that competition
makes sports dramatic. At this theatre, actors, and audiences are neither
only feasting on patriarchal and capitalist ideology, nor only constrained
by a sport logic forcing them to pursue this line of actions. Competition
holds both conflictual and solidary prospects, for both macro-cultures
(Sahlins, 1976) and for micro-cultural behavior (Fine, 2015). Sports allow
actions with democratic aspirations and with feelings for others. Women
sports evoke, at least for some, meanings about a biological disposition of
female ability and power to fight for and protect one of our most valu-
able possessions, the newborn child. As a result, some sport journalists
6 BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY OF SPORTS 189
see women athletes’ success as not only a sport victory but also as a social
triumph in the political fight for gender equality. This is a fight in which
iconic athletes like Gro Hammerseng-Edin fuse on-court fighting-force
with real wishes for humanity and a more LGBTQ inclusive democracy.
This universal prospect of competition takes many cultural forms. Colin
Kaepernick’s knee-stand, Megan Rapino’s criticism, and Hammerseng’s
advocacy are contingent on landscapes of meaning. In joining perfor-
mance theory with classical work on play and games, we see this ambiva-
lence as social powers and solidarities enter the many sport realms that
have earlier, and at time still are, dominated by men. To balance the crit-
ical theorist’s bookkeeping and make critical sport actors and journalists
a centerpiece of our analyses, concepts like that of Alexander’s (2006,
2015) civil sphere must be allowed to enter through sport performances.
The iconic handballgirl plays with subordination, opposes oppression,
and challenges us to break the double-bind-spell that the critical theorist
has put on sport. She defies us to account for the many rapid gendered
transformations in contemporary sports and to theorize what is causing
change. In this book, I have shown how social power and solidary are
shaped in the form of feedback loops. We have seen how broad meanings
flow through institutions, groups, and individual play. The meanings of
sport are thus many and its bodies, actions, and genders equally so. The
sport binary and split into two sex-categories of play can try to control,
but cannot escape this cultural fact.
Presenting a meaning-centered alternative to critical studies of sport
and gender, I started out drawing a bold distinction. It is most fruit-
ful perhaps to see gender difference and the attractions of mastery and
belonging as additive rather than pertaining to two different and anti-
thetical approaches. In the first half of the empirical chapters, media pre-
sentations allowed us to engage these questions and answer them in the
language of enchantment. Sports are games of chance in which athletes
play out a quest with an unpredictable end. Immersion in play is cen-
tral for the actor and for the journalist trying to furnish the spectators
psychological identification. This process narrows our focus to the imme-
diacy of the quest as it ornate and elaborates sport with nearby culture.
When journalists are successful, social life is played out in the sporting
act and materializes in the corporal mold of an athlete. As we reflect on
society through sport, the existential questions and answers we found in
archaic myth starts bubbling under the surface of the sporting myths of
modernity. Sports allow us to deal with power and equality, struggle and
190 T. B. BROCH
civility. Its aesthetic rendition of social life, its mimicry of characters and
varied casts of protagonists and villains, becomes a social drama, at times,
so life-like that it challenges and changes how we think about society. In
modernity, sport is no longer ritual but performance. Sports can there-
fore show how we as women and men, girls and boys, can try out and
practice our mastery of social life in a heightened moment of competition.
Moral meanings and social quests keep breaching this play to bolster cer-
tain types of protagonists. This is a very real and culturally contingent
masking and glorifying of particular men and women athletes.
While our existential problems travel well across time and space, our
answers as to how we should maneuver chance, struggle, and solidarity
do not always equal. In Norway, I have argued, the code of sameness
fuels a Scandinavian version of egalitarian individualism that also shapes
gendered life. At the apex of this system, resides, among other artifacts,
the handballgirl. It is true, this handballer does throw like a girl. She is
also criticized from time to time. Yet considerable evidence shows that
she is not easily marginalized. The handballgirl is iconized. This is done
through an alignment of cultural patterns, that to an outsider might look
like a courting and bending of powerful patriarchal relations. To many
Norwegians, it is a sober and formal ceremony that at times evokes pow-
erful sentiments of moral belonging.3 The handball-girl reveals how a
civil passion for equality shapes sport politics and actions. Its performa-
tive repetition at the sport theatre is naturalizing her social and democratic
power. Her toughness is transformed into a biological predisposition for
an iconic rendition of the fight for equality. Being the first sex of the
game, the handballgirl and her coach meaningfully transformed compe-
tition from a patriarchal regime into a myth and image of a democracy
in which the athlete is held accountable for her own choices. The second
sex of handball, “the almost team,” had to amend their approach, find a
leader that cared for his team, start smiling and tone down their testos-
terone roars. The men had to stop boasting and go back to the modest
basics of sports joy that the women had long practiced. Only after this
and a little bit of success of course, could they renegotiate their contracts
and demand the same salary as the women. Do not be fooled, “the almost
team” is as tough as they come. When their bodies enter the court, a vast
repertoire of narratives and myth enter along with them to transform the
game itself into a fight sport with a ball. The sport war is however, no
longer won by brute force.
In the second half of the book, these meanings enter youth sport are-
nas. Mundane and institutional life is somewhat messier than the narra-
tives we find in the sport media. Yet, the fusion of democratic leadership
and competitive toughness, its promises of enchantment, was also a mean-
ingful part of the youth socialization. To play the game efficiently, they
had to be tough and even act a “little mean” toward their opponents. This
was no easy task. Being and becoming handball players had to be felt.
Toughness had to be felicitous. Handball carves out an arena in which
the girls’ competitive toughness is honed and in which objects as the
sport tape lets participants feel toughness attach to and support their cor-
poral silhouette. A rich cast of elite women handballers provided models
for meaningful body techniques and team tactics, as well as interactional
cues and clues. Camilla Herrem and Heidi Løke became archetypes that
outperformed a clichéd schoolgirl, a cuddling mother figure and a vain
girl of porcelain. The charismatic power of the handballgirl guided the
young women in using the iconic smile-weapon to demoralize the oppo-
sition and reinvigorate team spirit. But beneath this surface smile, stirred
the struggles for harmony in competition and the emotional turmoil of
playing together in a relationship. Emotional life had to be reshaped by
the game’s feeling rules that proscribed toughness with a smile. This
story of “the handballgirl in the making” shows how elite and youth
sports re-fuse in hermeneutic spirals and how sameness can hide emo-
tional despairs of hierarchal skill-distinctions. These meanings run amid
broad and group culture right onto the young women’s smiling faces of
democracy. With critical theory and Bourdieu, capital is always hierar-
chal. These girls chased democratic capital as they were socialized into its
habitualized and anti-patriarchal form. As an endless project, this sport
democracy was performed in an instance, guided onwards, but never fully
obtained (Alexander, 2006, 2015).
Cultural power crystallizes and sprinkles as we entered the boys’ team
to study how the center of a meaningful web keys individuals on a mul-
titude of shared and private cords. Once again, broad cultural meaning,
from global and national media, enters the arena. The boys had to trans-
late, even reshape narratives as the corporal and social realities of the team
challenged us in the joint effort of meaning-seeking. The first-string team
repeatedly tried to enter iconic flows of toughness through Any Given
Sunday. Staged at the right moment, they attempted to bring the movie
script onto the court as a vortex spinning solidary rhythms and spitting
single acts of talents. By engaging at this moment resting in between play
192 T. B. BROCH
and seriousness, the boys were allowed and denied different forms of flow.
This gateway to enchantment was opened for all to see. Some entered
as warrior athletes in serious contests, others as clowns in childish play.
All the boys clowned around from time to time, but some of the boys
could more easily escape this archetype than others. As abstract meaning
attached to actions and bodies, its subjective truths became highly tan-
gible, deeply felt, and hard to undo. The lack of mobility between the
first- and second-string teams and the sad clown removing his shameful
frown, is testament to this claim. This very real feeling of not making the
cut, of just barely belonging, was emotionally draining. Sport rationalism
kept feeding into this highly irrational process. Like magic, scouts looked
into crystal bowls to create an objectively held talent. Aired on national
television, feared by caring mothers, hated and admired by skinny teenage
boys—the senior handballboy is tall and heavy with the will of persever-
ance in strict training regimes. This dreaded man-figure, only obtainable
to those who are genetically disposed, was by the boys named the pol-
luted “weight pumper.” His style of play was called outdated, from the
“stone-age” and his power was questioned and ridiculed. Yet the boys
also admired the hierarchy of men, used its myths of injuries and grit
to alleviate selves from strain and to keep their team intact with narra-
tives and characters. Any Given Sunday, that at a first glance might look
like a patriarchal ritual reinforcing the stone-age mentality of the weight-
pumper, opened up a cultural cleft between adulthood and childhood. It
strucks a deep cord of belonging in the time and space of an untampered
youth and childish play. This is neither a stable place, nor a space that
can be fully regained by the casual mechanics of ritual. It is where Vidar
found transient alleviation as well as a redemption from the material and
economic lures plaguing the serious social worlds of adults. In sports, he
escaped into this imaginative play and very real friendships symbolized by
a “sport family.” Some of these friendships carried outside the handball
halls. Some did not. Vidar knew this, so did his team. In their struggles,
they show us how patriarchal and inclusive masculinities are ideal types
of the moment and that the archetypes of the coach, his heroes, villains,
and clowns are always transitioning in between. The boys and their coach
fluctuated between flows of play and seriousness.
The comparative prospect of joining a media study with an ethnogra-
phy, exploring women and men elite sports as well as girl and boy youth
sports, shows how sport is merely a lens into something deeply human.
Sports dramatically reveals our balancing of irreconcilable yet meaningful
wishes. It shows how the smallest can prevail in the world of the colos-
sal. That dreams of adulthood linger on the meaningful idea of youth.
The seemingly trivial detail—Vidar’s fiery soul, the handballgirls’ mod-
est smile or a piece of sport tape—can interrupt or restore equilibrium.4
Sport media and sport practices de-fuse and re-fuse in feedback loops that
do not promise ritual causality, but a performative mediation as broad
culture is brought into the scripted realities of the situation. At the sport
theatre, women and men, girls and boys can perform their toughness.
They know they are performing, but the play will collapse if they do not
immerse in its act. Young teenage girls left the action with crocodile tears.
Boys left with a parrot’s jabber of injuries. Both strategies of play gave
some wiggle room to rest and join in whenever they liked to. Bjørn, the
coach of the 13-year-old girls seemingly knew this. He tried to advice the
girls to stop crying about missed shots and start thinking about the next
chance. The boys laughed for a split second before Bjørn got to the core
of their failed act as the lack of grit. This gendered reality, it is almost as
if the 15-year-old girl peers of the boy team knew about it too. As if they
had read Young’s (1980) calling out of men’s performative bravado. They
understood that injuries were cultural tools to control social relations and
for alleviating boys from physical and social strains. When the 13-year-
old girl needed some psychological taping, these sport actors were on to
something. Athletes and coaches know that the ways in which codes and
props are put in play are performatives that attempt to shape and control
social life in meaningful ways. Sport moves these emotions and meanings
into the public sphere—onto a sport theatre in which we practice our
cultural mastery of meaning and balance our binaries of conflict and sol-
idarity, of masculinities and femininities. The field observations make us
attentive to how the code of play and seriousness intersects with other
culture structures to shape social power. Play, as our classical theorists
suggested, opens up for agency and allows sports to question hierarchies
and shape freedom. It helps us get to the core of ambivalence and to
see why the journalists were so preoccupied with uncertainties. This is
how we go about social life, perhaps not in the romantic way of Huzin-
ga’s playful civilization, but in the ways of a cultural pragmatics shaping
gender, action, and social life.
194 T. B. BROCH
Reconciliation and Looking Ahead

On a mission to create an alternative analysis of sport and gender, one that
does not lose track of diversity, mastery and belonging, the critical the-
orist has been a convenient rival. The time to bring about reconciliation
has now come. Indeed, careful and critical readers have likely noted my
compromising here and there. Gender power is certainly present in my
rereading of the journalist’s, coach’s and athlete’s take on sports. The sex
category, the division of play into recognizable male and female classes, is
an undeniable aspect of sports. Recognizing what Smith (2008) defines as
“symbolic layering,” has nonetheless offered me challenges to study sports
and gender in modernity as mediated by belonging and attraction. I have
taken very seriously anthropological and micro-sociological work that has
shown how sports build communities and identities. At this switch point,
between interaction and broad culture, is where a cultural sociology of
performance gives promise. It might fall short of pleasing the diehard
critical thinker studying how categories and institutions force all too sim-
ple identities. It might not please interactionists believing that categories,
communities, and solidarities are only produced by groups. For the curi-
ous, it holds the prospect to start interrupting our studies with new layers
of meaning. A cultural sociology of sports asks questions about the plau-
sible limits to the social categories that enter and that emerge as insti-
tutions, groups, and individuals maneuver social life. Its main aim is to
understand the clashes and coexistence of solidary and conflict that can
possibly create changes to the content of our categories.
Cultural sociology is deeply committed to the interpretive enterprise of
abductive reasoning (Reed, 2011; Small, 2009; Spillman, 2014). We have
to show how actors maneuver meaningful landscapes, codes, and narra-
tives to shape actions and objects.5 The ways in which meaning struc-
tures guide mastery and emotive actions are key if we try to get at the
heart of what makes sport a global phenomenon. Even so, the universal
modalities of play, game, and performance that make out sports have to
be fitted out with the meanings that make global sports meaningful to
actors and audiences. This approach requires a striving for thick descrip-
tion and a structural hermeneutics that can make the study of sports sur-
prising and baffling, both empirically and theoretically. As universal game
languages are expressed in playful dialects, inequality, and injustice are
rewritten with local myths and narratives about equality and justice. This
is the joint enterprise achieved in which the researcher reconstructs the
ways in which the participant actors use sport to play with macro social
categories as well as micro social worlds. The iconic female athlete is not
simply restoring patriarchal capitalism as a signifier of sex difference and
female inabilities. Nor is she only a hollow commodity that is used to sell a
false consciousness of empowerment. The female athlete is also a powerful
icon of solidarity in struggles for democracy. The Norwegian handballgirl
is an attractive sponsor object and a national darling as she reverses the
neo-Marxist thesis in sport sociology. This iconic female-athlete’s attrac-
tion also resides in her realization of success in sameness and her mythical
disguising of gender inequality by naturalizing equality. A social psycho-
analysis digs below sports’ game-surfaces for this deep cultural explana-
tion. The aim is to fathom how meaningful sports intersect with social
structure, how actors translate injustice, and how inequality is rendered
tolerable through dialog.6
Sport sociology has traditionally been an ameliorative discipline fusing
critical theory to data from the field of practice. In doing so, it has made
huge gains and keeps pushing for more humane sport experiences. To
continue this work on improving practices, is not the shedding of false
universalisms a means to a more effective politics?7 To help sport actors
welcome diversity, is not a finer grasp of colorful variations and perceived
similarities vital? To change sport actions for the better, we need to map
the modalities of sports and its actors’ meaningful and powerful problem-
solving abilities. We can agree and disagree with the journalists rereading
of democratic sports, with the coaches’ philosophies and their practices
of democratic leadership laid out in this book. Yet, it is unlikely that
their play, social, and cultural abilities in dealing with ambivalence can-
not inspire ameliorative aims for coaches, managers, politicians, and aca-
demics alike. Perhaps the books and papers loaded with applied research
ambitions need to balance criticism with some praise of lived abilities and
real wishes for improvements.
Sports are not only battle zones of social conflict. Sport is also institu-
tionalized play. Here children and adults shape their bodies by behavioral
modeling. Indeed, Foucault (1977) can reveal sports as stylized forms
of interaction that have become institutional instruments shaping docile
bodies and robot-like subjects. The practice-oriented Bourdieusian can
tempt us to focus on how the game structure and social power-patterns
fuse to shape rational behavior, even cognition.8 Both Bourdieusians and
Foucaultians are likely to avoid the significance of broad narratives and
196 T. B. BROCH
myth in studying sport practices. That is what I have done. The anal-
yses I present show how the socialization of the handballgirl is deeply
meaningful. That the daily and automated actions of the socialized hand-
ballboy require meaningful redirection and energy. Surely, athletes have
to habitualize the game’s interactional tracks and technical skills to be
able to perform. If not, there would be no social script on which cultural
mastery can flow and there would be no social felicity generating mean-
ingful yet changing repetitions. Performance theory bridges meaning and
pragmatics, it unites game structure and cultural variation through play,
to show us how culture keeps shaping actions and minds. A great sport
act is not mechanical but holds emotions of broad significance. The
great athletic performer strives to immerse in a performative feel for the
game in which game automations allow patterned chains of intuition and
enchanted states of flow. In flow, she feels the strings of significance that
pulls and pushes the cultural webs within her reach. In sports Actor and
audiences can flow together, at the same time, yet in the various directions
our biographies and shared sentiments take us. In iconic flow, we are truly
cultural yet also in a state of experiencing an intensified subjective being
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Mead, 1934/2015). Meaningful gender and
hierarchy, dramas of rationality and automation, are with cultural soci-
ology understood to be among the many forces that can allow and gen-
erate this immersion. A performative feel for the game is evoked when
sports provoke and play out these broad moral and emotive forces in the
focused micro setting of games. Sports’ meaning plays on several strings
at the same time (Geertz, 1973a) so should our analyses of its bodies and
actions. From this vantage point, a multidimensional analysis can develop.
A performative feel for the game resembles dreaming, not in the usual
way of sleep, but as the social phenomenon of deep hermeneutics. The
key to accessing this process is a socio-cultural pattern analysis. Sahlins,
via Bateson, to cultural sociology, urges a systematic attention to this wide
range of symbolic layering.9 Varied social life persists as it is mediated by
our many broad, institutional, and personal cultures. Among the coaches
of the boy’s team I spent time with, there were clear disagreements about
what rationality really is. The head coach’s colleagues saw his dream of
a never-ending solidarity creating committed athletes as naïve, irrational,
and romantic. Yet, they understood that the idea was meaningful to him.
That it tied him to the team and the team to him. They liked how this
devotion shaped his relentless caring for the team and therefore kindly and
carefully tried to ease his pains of future separation. The head coach him-
self felt the enchantment of belonging as he played among his boys and
composed their movements, up and down, left to right. His choreogra-
phy made sense in his own narrative identity of dedication.10 In sport, we
might lose a sense of self in flow, but not without friends and colleagues
waking us up from time to time. Paradoxically, on exiting flow, having
felt the being of a true narrative self, cultural mastery does not alleviate
self-inspection. For the head coach of the boys, exiting flow reinforced his
identity as a reflective coach. Sensory residue is perhaps more memorable
than the moment of flow itself. A cultural sociology of performance offers
a key to open doors into a study of how deep culture shapes individuals’
meaningful actions. It does so by being concerned about how meanings
about and within sports re-fuse, how culture and pragmatics link up in
sport. In various ways, a cultural sociology is attentive both to the quali-
ties of sports and to their surrounding societies.
Cultural codes provide us with the black and white, dark and bright
binaries that not only guide our lefts and rights on the court but also the
right and wrongs in social and moral worlds. Its cognitive simplifications
do not relieve us from shades of gray, but give magnetic force to the
social life that operates in between its poles. Notably, and this is where
this book ends and a cultural sociology of sport begins—the binaries dis-
covered inside and outside of Norwegian handball, the ways in which its
cultural power moves us, recognizes a deep contradiction in what is dark
and bright at the same time—of what is feminine and masculine all at
once. In the boys team, the coach wanted to harness and create talents
that would refuse the realities that come with being seen as talented, that
belonging would trump profit. The boys both looked up to and hated
the hyper-masculine elite male athlete. In the girl’s team, joy in personal
efforts of toughness and discontent in the ways in which its drama was
composed bred considerable need for emotion management. Wanting to
excel as an individual in a group, being seen as skillful and morally fit at
once, both technical and cultural skills had to fuse in a habitualized smile.
The attraction of sport, in other words, resides in the immediacy of deal-
ing with our existential and moral questions. Its emotional high pitch is
achieved if we strike a balance between the binaries and our focus narrows
in on the social life it generates. This is when toughness, civility, and gen-
dered narratives snap into alignment. Not always in an explicit form, but
in the sensory liquefying of boundaries between game and play, actors
and audiences, individuals and shared being. This is not the causality of a
198 T. B. BROCH
ritual that changes all social life moving on, but a ritual-like achievement
of sport in modernity. Only if the sporting theatre ignites its enchanted
prospect does the social life of sport become dramatic. This is when a
performative feel for the game shapes gender, bodies, and social life.
Notes
1. Margaret Mead (1928/2001) showed how a comparative approach to
sexualities, gender, and youth explicates our own cultural take on the same
issues. Archetti’s (1999) work on sport and gender shows how national
identity is actively used to distinguish the masculinities of various nations.
2. Coakley and Dunning (2002, p. xxix) view sports as pathological compe-
tition. Gumbrecht (2006) thus refrains from the use of competition, or
agon, and instead uses arete, or excellence, to circumvent this contentious
debate.
3. Benedict (1934/2005, pp. 94–95) looks into patterns of culture to argue
that while there are currents in our own culture that makes us misread
the American Indian’s snake dance as horrific. We project our emotions
onto a dancer that, in cultural fact, senses the snake as sacred and knows
that its poison sacs has been removed.
4. Inspired by Sturlason (1950/2008).
5. In other words, an interpretive and new-Durkheimian project (Alexander
& Smith, 2003; Durkheim, 1912/2001; Geertz, 1973b; Sahlins, 1976,
pp. 170–179; Smith & Alexander, 2005, p. 9).
6. Spillman (2002, 2005).
7. Reed (2011, p. 126).
8. Mast (2019) argue that automated cognition is shaped by representational
dimensions during socialization and that a general theory of action should
involve both cognition and representationalism. As a contrast he outlines
strong practice theory as dealing with the reproduction of “economic”
relations (Bourdieu, 1990) or the immediate and tangible culture of micro
settings (Swidler, 1986). See also Kurakin (2019).
9. From Sahlin’s (1976) insisting that arbitrary cultural patterns guides
meaning-making and actions, via Bateson’s (1972) cybernetic modeling of
relatively autonomous circuits, to cultural sociology’s toolkit that allows
us to systematically explore how culture structures are actively put in play
through performance and sensuously experienced through materialities.
10. Vidar’s self-narrative is thought to feed of broadly available narratives
(Bruner, 1986, 1990).
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Index
A Ambivalence, 22, 46, 95, 129, 141,

Aarsæther, D.S., 105 189, 193, 195
Abductive analysis/reasoning/tactic, Andersen, Anja, 23
5, 8, 20, 21, 65, 159, 191, 194 Anderson, E., 28, 171
Actors, 2–6, 9, 11, 14–19, 21, 23, 43, Anderson, S., 22
51, 53, 61, 62, 68, 72, 97, 99, Anthonissen, A., 7, 29
100, 127, 134, 138, 140, 158, Any Given Sunday, 150, 159, 180,
159, 172, 188, 189, 193–197 191, 192
Adolescense/adolescent, 102, 156, Apologetic (female), 7, 92
159, 179, 183 Archetti, E.P., 21, 28, 84, 115, 198
Adulthood, 9, 26, 98, 99, 101, 157, Archetypes, 163, 165
178, 192, 193 Åsgard, 55, 57
Aesthetic(s), 8, 11–13, 16–18, 21, 45, Askeladden, Espen, 101
46, 49, 50, 55, 66, 70, 71, 73, Askeland, Ø.K., 106
74, 84, 89, 122, 124, 128, 161, Attraction, 3, 8, 19, 22, 25, 43, 45,
190 59, 61, 157, 188, 189, 194, 195,
transformation, 10, 12 197
Aggression, 8, 26, 62, 64–67, 87 Audiences, 2, 10, 11, 14–17, 19, 24,
aggressive, 62 43, 44, 46–48, 52, 58, 61, 68,
controlled, 24, 62, 65, 69 70–72, 75, 83, 87, 90, 93, 99,
Alexander, J.C., 6, 14–20, 23, 26, 27, 106, 127, 138–140, 152, 158,
29, 47, 76, 77, 84, 87, 94, 103, 165, 167, 172, 188, 196, 197
106, 124, 130, 134, 183, 189, Austin, J.L., 29, 136
191, 198 Authenticity, 60, 76, 140
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 201
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8
202 INDEX
Aversa, F., 106 Broch, Harald B., 114, 158, 179

Broch, Trygve B., 23, 76, 77, 89,
139, 158
B Broch, Tuva B., 183
Background Bruce, T., 8, 28, 29, 119
codes, 57, 120 Bruner, J., 198
representations, 45, 142 Bugge, M., 90, 91, 136
Bäckström, Å., 28 Bunuel, A., 29
Bakke, T.G., 76 Butler, J., 6, 27
Bakkehaug, W., 104
Band-Aid, 127, 128, 142, 155, 179
Barthes, R., 2, 10 C
Bartmanski, D., 19 Caillois, R., 3, 10, 27, 68
Bateson, G., 10, 51, 196, 198 Capitalism, 8, 20, 28, 43, 83, 103,
Beauchez, J., 11, 21 188, 195
Beauvoir, S.d., 6, 27, 85, 116 Capranica, L., 106
Belonging, 1, 4, 8, 20–22, 46, 51, Carrington, B., 28
57, 116, 130, 139, 182, 183, Casper, K., 180
188–190, 192, 194, 197 Champagne, A.M., 16, 76, 124
Benedict, R., 198 Childhood, 26, 50, 76, 98, 102, 174,
Bentzrød, S.B., 106 179, 192
Berge, Christian, 96 children, 10, 17, 22, 23, 26, 54,
Berger, J., 100 58, 101, 113, 115, 118, 120,
Bergh, N., 76 129, 134, 157, 188, 195
Berkaak, O.A., 102 Chodorow, N.J., 88
Bernstein, A., 28 Choo, H.Y., 27
Biology, 60, 92, 93 Choreography, 10, 178, 197
Birrell, S., 68 Christiansen, A.K., 97
Bjarnason, B., 53, 54 Civil sphere, 23, 94, 189
Body Civility, 10, 94, 188, 190, 197
techniques, 118, 122, 191 Coaching
see also Corporal coaching youth, 147
Boltanski, L., 27 interpretive performers, 119
Borcila, A., 28 philosophy, 116, 174
Bourdieu, P., 7, 18, 28, 48, 113, 144, practices, 129, 137
191, 198 regimes, 97
Boyle, R., 48 styles, 97, 131, 178
Brakstad, T.H.S., 94 see also Leadership
Breivang, Karoline Dyhre, 50, 67, 74, Coad, D., 28
85 Coakley, J., 28, 62, 198
Breivik, Marit, 46, 96, 116, 129, 131, Codes, 2, 6, 9, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19,
132, 140, 142, 144 22, 28, 46, 53, 57, 59, 60, 62,
INDEX 203
70, 77, 84, 103, 122, 157, 164, Culture structure, 4, 9, 15, 16, 19,
175, 193, 194, 197 20, 24, 57, 62, 94, 187, 188,
of play and seriousness, 22, 192 193, 198
of sameness, 23, 190
the handball code, 21, 69–71, 87, D
88, 99, 100, 124, 127, 132, Dahlén, P., 51, 105, 150
137, 141 Dallaire, C., 106
Collins, R., 11, 67, 122, 158, 183 Daloz, J.-P., 17, 23, 124
Commentary, 12, 20, 44, 45, 59, 62, Daniels, D.B., 28
86, 88, 92, 135 Davis-Delano, L.R., 28
Comparative (research/prospect), 1, Defusion, 17, 19
4, 9, 20, 24, 57, 59, 61, 62, 87, DeLand, M.F., 21
92, 95, 105, 189, 192, 194, 198 Delebekk, B.S., 69
Condensation (symbolic), 9, 10, 17, Democracy, 3, 25, 93, 95, 96, 140,
21, 56, 57, 72, 103, 124, 134, 141, 188–191, 195
141 Democratic, 3–5, 21, 94, 95, 97, 105,
113, 115, 129, 132, 137–139,
Connell, R., 6, 27, 28, 92, 98, 101,
141, 161, 162, 164, 167, 188,
171
190, 191, 195
Cooky, C., 28, 75, 83, 119
ambitions, 3, 26
Corporal, 16, 17, 24, 46, 53, 57, 60, project, 4, 10, 23, 95, 130
71, 75, 83, 90, 92, 97–99, 105, Diamond League, 51, 76
114, 119, 120, 122, 124, 152, Didactic, 134
167, 170, 173, 177, 189, 191 Discourse, 7, 18, 22, 28, 43, 60
Crenshaw, K., 27 Douglas, M., 75
Critical theory(ies), 2, 7, 57, 87, 103, Doxa, 7, 28
195 Drama, 1, 2, 47, 49, 52, 62, 70, 72,
gender, 1, 87 86, 102, 103, 127, 128, 130,
sociology, 2, 103, 195 139, 154, 157, 197
studies, 3, 85, 194 social, 24, 44, 46, 104, 188, 190
Dramaturgic loyalty, 130, 138
theorist(s), 2, 3, 5–9, 43, 48,
Dramaturgy/dramaturge/dramaturgic,
83–85, 88, 156, 187–189, 194
9, 14, 16, 17, 25, 44, 46, 74
Csikszentmihalyi, M., 11, 17, 19, 68, Dramaturgy/dramaturge/dramaturgic,
70, 122, 196 120, 121, 125, 127, 130, 134,
Cultural mastery, 1, 17, 19, 25, 120, 135
134, 140, 151, 188, 193, 196, Dream(s)/dreaming, 22, 26, 52, 56,
197 166, 179, 193, 196
Cultural sociology, 2, 6, 9, 14, 21, Dunbar, M., 29, 75
22, 26, 29, 77, 103, 144, 194, Duncan, M.C., 88
197, 198 Dunning, E., 28, 198
of sport, 3, 14, 15, 18, 194, 197 Durkheim, É., 2, 9, 14, 26, 144, 183
204 INDEX
Dworkin, S.L., 105 Ferree, M.M., 27

Dyck, N., 22, 28, 179 Fine, G.A., 11, 21, 49, 66, 70, 76,
138, 183, 188
Flow, 4, 19, 21, 44, 59, 68, 70, 120,
E 122, 133, 158, 165, 175, 182,
Egalitarianism, 140, 141 189, 192, 196, 197. See also
egalitarian individualism, 22, 84, Iconic flow
190 Follo, G., 28
Einherjer, 24, 55–57 Fossbakken, E., 94
Eliade, M., 53, 75 Foucault, M., 7, 18, 28, 113, 122,
Elias, N., 11, 49 128, 195
Eliasoph, N., 15 Fraser, N., 5
Eliasoph, N., 144, 162 Freedom, 2, 3, 8, 10, 15, 193
Emotion management, 17, 128, 137, Freud, S., 134
197 Frønes, I., 102
Enchantment, 3, 24, 25, 49, 52, 55, Fusion, 17, 22, 24, 25, 43, 92, 94,
57, 59, 61, 95, 124, 158, 189, 98, 122, 140, 157, 191
191, 192, 197
Epstein, D., 98
Equality, 4, 23, 24, 26, 84, 85, 95, G
103, 134, 140, 189, 190, 194, Gaiman, N., 77, 89
195 Game, 1–4, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17–22,
Erikson, E., 29 24–26, 29, 44–53, 56, 57, 59–64,
Ertesvåg, O.R., 93 66–72, 74, 75, 84, 86, 87, 89,
Ethnography, 4, 21, 129, 183, 192 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99–102, 105,
Existential questions/problems, 4, 43, 114, 116–120, 122, 124–130,
56, 61, 95, 99, 151, 182, 189, 133–143, 148–153, 155, 156,
190 158, 160–166, 168, 171, 174,
176, 177, 179–182, 188, 190,
191, 194, 196–198
F Garborg, A., 88
Farquharson, K., 28 Gee, S., 28, 85
Fasting, K., 28, 29, 76 Geertz, C., 3, 10, 19, 20, 27, 51,
Feeling rules, 25, 136, 138, 139, 144, 183, 196, 198
158, 191 Gender
Felicity, 3, 12, 19, 21, 29, 47, 57, enchantment, 43, 55, 61
114, 139, 164, 165, 175, 196 equality, 3, 4, 8, 23, 84, 89, 94,
Femininity(ies), 5–7, 25, 28, 85, 87, 95, 188, 189
89, 91, 144, 193 felicity, 21, 29, 175
Feminism, 5, 93, 113, 128, 188 power, 2–6, 8, 20–22, 27, 58, 61,
second wave, 84, 113 84, 85, 89, 103, 105, 106,
Feminist theory, 5 141, 187, 188, 193, 194
Fenstermaker, S., 27 sameness, 20, 23, 140, 195
INDEX 205
Gender perspective, 6, 7, 92, 93, 102, Hansen, J.-E.E., 77

171, 178, 188 Haraldsen, S., 54
Genes, 119 Harkness, G., 105
genetic, 166 Haynes, R., 48
Gennep, A.v., 76 Hegemony, 6–8, 27
Genre, 20, 44, 45, 59, 86, 94, 102 hegemonic, 14, 27
quest, 15, 20, 49, 187 hegemonic masculinity, 27, 58, 85,
Giesen, B., 16 87, 92, 129, 164
Gjekstad, Ole Gustav, 104 Heidi, Løke, 60, 92, 132, 133, 191
Gmelch, G., 158 Helland, K., 48
Goffman, E., 3, 11, 27, 29, 51, 68, Hemmestad, L., 97
127, 144 Henningsen, E., 23
Goksøyr, M., 29, 44, 54, 87 Hermeneutic(s), 92
Goldman, R., 44 deep, 196
Gomez, K., 105 loops/spirals, 26, 191
Grahn, K., 29 power, 18, 19, 83, 100
Green, K., 23, 113 structural, 20, 194
Gregor, T., 98, 159 Hermundstad, G., 89, 183
Grindstaff, L., 28 Herrebrøden, Ø., 97
Grini, Kjertsi, 87, 166, 167, 176 Herrem, Camilla, 86, 93, 117, 140,
Grønning, T.B., 76 191
Gullestad, M., 22, 23, 140 Heteronormativity, 7, 8
Gumbrecht, H.U., 8, 17, 52, 68, 75, Heterosexual, 7, 93
76, 198 Heywood, L., 105
Gusta, Randi, 96, 104, 178 Hilmar, T., 48, 94
Gustavsen, A.M., 175 Hirdman, Y., 6, 27
Hjelseth, A., 28
Hochschild, A.R., 90, 144
H Hoel, Y.S., 93
Habitualize, 14, 18, 191, 196, 197 Hoffengh, S., 54
Hall, K., 27 Hognestad, H., 52
Hamayon, R., 68 Holden, L., 69
Hammerseng-Edin, Anja, 93 Holst, C., 23
Hammerseng-Edin, Gro, 59, 87, 93 Hovden, J., 28
Handballboy, 3, 24, 25, 59, 95–97, Huizinga, J., 9, 27
101, 103, 104, 115, 136, 148, Hunt, D., 29, 75
150, 151, 177, 192, 196
Handballgirl, 3, 22, 24, 25, 47, 58,
83, 84, 86, 90–97, 104, 105, I
113–116, 119, 120, 124, 127, Icon, 16, 24, 25, 47, 53, 57, 84, 94,
128, 132, 133, 135–138, 140, 106, 119, 140, 195
151, 167, 176, 189–191, 195, Iconic consciousness, 16, 68, 70, 75,
196 89, 92
206 INDEX
Iconic flow, 19, 24, 25, 46, 52, 57, Latour, B., 27, 170
59, 61, 69, 91, 115, 124, 161, Leadership
165, 191, 196 democratic, 97, 105, 129, 167,
Iconicity, 16, 18, 57, 105, 106, 113 191, 195
Identity, 11, 162, 197 Lengermann, P.M., 5
Identity politics, 5 LGBT(Q), 93, 189
Inequality, 1, 2, 4–9, 18, 26, 28, 43, Lichterman, P., 15, 162
93–95, 144, 188, 194, 195 Lidén, H., 23
Injustice, 5, 6, 21, 94, 188, 194, 195 Lie, S.L., 92
Intersectionality, 5–7, 27 Lien, M., 23
Intuition, 11, 66, 122, 196 Lindgren, A., 50
Irrational, 1, 192, 196 Logan, A., 180
Løkka, N., 58
Lund, A., 134
J
Jansen, S.C., 85
Jensen, K., 88
M
Jijon, I., 20, 84
MacAloon, J.J., 28
Johansen, P.F., 23, 64
MacKay, S., 106
Jones, N., 27
Magic, 1, 3, 25, 26, 56, 59, 158, 192
Jorem, Ø., 98
Marjoribanks, T., 28
Justice, 5, 61, 85, 93, 94, 102, 105,
Markula, P., 28, 29
194
Marx, 5, 139, 188
cultural marxism, 7
K Masculinity(ies), 2, 5–8, 98, 100, 171,
Karlsen, A., 106 172, 178, 180, 183, 192, 193,
Katz, J., 29 198
Kian, E.M., 28 Mast, J.L., 198
Kimmel, M.S., 28 Materiality, 9–11
King, C., 106 corporal metariality, 16, 24, 83, 92,
Kjesrud, K., 58 124, 166, 170, 177
Knoppers, A., 7, 29 McCormick, L., 51
Koh, E., 28 McDorman, T.F., 180
Kristiansen, E., 28, 158 McGinley, S., 180
Kunda, G., 183 Mead, G.H., 9, 28, 68, 196
Kurakin, D., 198 Mead, M., 198
Media, 1, 4, 8, 15, 21–26, 48, 51,
52, 61, 70, 84, 87, 93, 96–98,
L 104, 105, 113, 119, 124, 129,
Lamont, M., 55 133, 135, 178, 189, 191, 192
Langsem, B., 54 Meier, K.V., 28
Larsen, H., 23, 87 Meritocracy, 162
INDEX 207
Messerschmidt, J.W., 27 Nielsen, H.B., 6, 7, 27, 85

Messner, M.A., 21, 22, 28, 48, 62, Norse myth(ology), 24, 47, 51, 55,
75, 83, 85, 88, 119 58, 59, 105, 115
Metaphor, 54, 70, 72, 75, 85, 86, NTB, 76, 83
166
Mimicry, 12, 68, 190
Mis-en-scèn, 17 O
Modernity, 8, 10, 14, 19, 20, 24, 26, Olstad, F., 44
43, 49, 55, 69, 113, 171, 180, Omnipotence, 10, 19, 120
183, 189, 190, 194, 198 Onomatopoetic(on), 63, 71
Moen, K.M., 113 sound imitations, 71
Moen, T.O., 87 Overvik, J., 69, 87
Moral depth, 16, 124
Moralities, 10, 15, 16, 21, 25, 55, 84,
103, 120, 139, 147, 183
P
Mueller, H.S., 93
Pacino, Al, 150, 159, 162
Multidimensional analysis, 15, 196
Papson, S., 44
Mundal, E., 58, 60, 69
Participant field observations, 21
Munthe, M., 100, 101
Passivity/passive, 8, 58, 64–66, 69,
Musto, M., 28, 29, 75, 83
97, 100, 132, 134, 136, 157,
Myrhol, Bjarte, 96
160
Myth, 2, 4, 9, 14–16, 18, 19, 21–26,
Patriarchy/patriarchal, 2, 5–8, 20, 21,
45, 51, 55, 58, 61, 84, 99, 113,
26–28, 43, 83, 85, 89, 103, 105,
134, 157, 179, 189, 190, 196
116, 129, 141, 157, 171, 178,
188, 190–192, 195
N Pedagogy, 116
Næss, H.E., 44 Performance, 2, 3, 7, 14–21, 26, 45,
Narrative(s), 2, 4, 6, 9, 14, 15, 19–23, 46, 49, 51, 57, 62, 70, 74, 75,
25, 44–47, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 84, 85, 89, 91–94, 103, 106,
57, 59, 60, 70, 72, 84, 86, 93, 121, 132, 134, 137–139, 156,
96, 99, 100, 102, 113, 114, 120, 159, 160, 164, 178, 179, 183,
125, 127, 134, 136, 157, 161, 189, 190, 194, 196, 197
163–166, 179, 182, 183, 188, Pfister, G., 28, 29
190–192, 194, 195, 197 Phenomenology, 22, 120, 128, 129,
National identity, 7, 8, 22, 95, 188, 135
198 Play, 2, 3, 8–12, 14–22, 24–26,
and gender, 7, 95 43, 45–48, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57,
Nationalism, 7, 8, 43 59, 61–64, 66–70, 72, 74–76,
Naturalization/naturalize, 6, 85, 92, 84–87, 89, 94–97, 99, 105,
93, 95, 105, 190, 195 116, 120–122, 124–129, 131,
Neagu, Cristina, 64, 85 134–136, 138, 139, 143, 148,
Niebrugge-Brantley, J., 5 150–152, 155–165, 168, 169,
208 INDEX
171, 172, 175, 176, 179, 181, Scouts (talent), 56, 166, 167, 192
182, 187–198 Scraton, S., 28, 29
Politics, 95, 140 Scripts, 11, 15–18, 20, 53, 69, 70,
political, 5, 58, 83, 98, 102, 187, 89, 135, 141, 168, 177, 178,
189 191, 196
sport politics, 190 Separation, 1, 10, 19, 159, 197
Pollock, A., 28 Shore, B., 10, 11
Popper, K., 188 Simmel, G., 11
Propp, V., 75 Sisjord, M.K., 28
Protagonist, 190 Skarpenes, O., 23
Skill acquisition, 4, 9, 18, 19, 113
Slagstad, R., 96, 144
Q Small, M.L., 29, 194
Quiroz, E., 105 Smith, A.S., 92
Smith, P., 16–18, 20, 26, 27, 29, 122,
128, 162, 188, 194, 198
R
Social psychoanalysis, 24, 51, 88, 97,
Rafoss, K., 28
161, 195
Reed, I.A., 5, 18, 26, 29, 194, 198
Socialization, 4, 9, 21, 114, 128, 133,
Re-fusion, 24, 44, 87
191, 196, 198
(re)Immersion
in youth, 153, 175, 182 Solidarity, 2, 4, 22, 23, 25, 76, 93,
Rhythm(s), 11, 16, 17, 19, 26, 62, 94, 103, 120, 130, 131, 139,
63, 65, 66, 70, 75, 76, 99, 122, 151, 158, 165, 180, 188, 190,
123, 129, 152, 158, 159, 162, 195, 196
163, 191 and conflict, 2, 161, 179, 188, 193,
Ritual, 2, 9, 10, 76, 94, 158, 160, 194
162, 164, 175, 183, 190, 192, gendered, 4, 103
193, 198 Sonnevend, J., 16, 103
ritual-like, 9, 17, 57, 198 Spaaij, R., 28
ritualistic, 1 Spillman, L., 11, 15, 29, 55, 84, 106,
Ronglan, L.T., 131, 132, 136, 179 141, 194, 198
Rowe, D., 44, 46 Sport (as) war, 22, 72, 85–87, 101,
Rowlands, P.S., 93 105, 190
(Sport) cultural capital, 16, 87, 136,
144
S Sport journalism, 66
Sæther, E.O., 59, 83, 84, 94 Sport media, 19, 21, 24, 25, 43, 57,
Sabo, D.F., 28, 85 105, 191, 193
Sacred and profane/polluted sport/media-complex, 113
symbolism, 62, 97, 98 Sport(s) tape, 17, 124
Sahlins, M., 188, 196, 198 Stereotype(s), 5, 6, 106, 120, 133,
Sameness, 128, 129, 164, 187, 191 134
INDEX 209
Stereotyped/stereotypic, 118, 133, V

136 Vaage, O., 113
Stone, O., 150, 178 Vike, H., 23
Sturlason, S., 55–57, 198 von der Lippe, G., 28, 29
Style(s) of play, 15, 16, 160, 167, Vose, J.E., 28
177, 192
Subordination, 6, 8, 134, 189
Suits, B., 28
W
Sutton-Smith, B., 8, 17
Wacquant, L., 18, 113
Swidler, A., 15, 28, 77, 198
Weber, Max, 139
Symbolic layering, 15, 19, 21, 22,
194, 196 Welhaven, L., 93
Wenner, L.A., 29, 75
Wensing, E.H., 8, 29, 119
T West, C., 27
Talent, 18, 56, 86, 115, 151, 166, West, E., 28
167, 170, 177, 191, 192, 197 Winnicott, D.W., 9, 10, 19, 28, 50,
The tall girl project, 167 51, 68, 157
Tavory, I., 20, 28, 77 Winther, P, 106
Teen(s)/teenagers, 25, 161, 174, 175
Theatre, 2, 3, 15, 46, 47, 51, 61, 70,
95, 99, 164, 188, 190, 193, 198
Y
Theberge, N., 7, 21, 28, 129
Young, I.M., 116, 119, 120, 156, 193
Thévenot, L., 55
Youth, 4, 21–23, 25, 43, 48, 50,
Thorpe, H., 28
55, 70, 75, 86, 89, 90, 93, 98,
Thurston, M., 113
113, 115, 116, 118, 133, 148,
Timmermans, S., 20
150, 157, 166, 171, 178, 179,
Todorov, T., 75
191–193, 198
Tolkien, J.R.R., 76
youthhood, 49, 105, 116
Transference, 120, 161
Ytre-Arne, B., 48
Transitioning (age and symbolism),
116, 157, 192
Trondman, M., 131, 179
Trujillo, N., 62, 85 Z
Turner, V., 76 Zimmerman, D., 6, 27

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CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY

More information about this series at

Cover illustration: imagedepotpro/E+/Getty Images

New Haven, CT Philip Smith

period was winding down, cultural theory embracing ambivalence was

Elverum, Norway Trygve B. Broch

1 Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender 1

Part I Media, Sport Enchantment and Gender

2 Media and Sport Enchantment: Narrative, Myth,

3 Enchanted Fusion: Bringing Together Game Play

Part II Socialization, Sport Felicity and Gender

4 Throwing Like a Handballgirl: Performance

5 Throwing Like a Handballboy: Enchanted Flows

6 By Way of Conclusion: A Cultural Sociology of Sports 187

Table 2.1 The handball code delineates the sacred and polluted

Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender

During the 1970s the Norwegian handball federation decided to invest

© The Author(s) 2020 1

I place this nexus of a democratic myth and the daily experience of

The Challenge of the Critical Theorist:

on the contours of sport inequality, these ethnographers have dealt with

Meaning-Making and Sport: Play and Game Theory

masked form, through mimicry or aesthetic transformation. Its actions

What is Handball? A one-stop shop

info about the game on Wikipedia, game instructions and highlight

A Cultural Sociology of Sport: Culture

therefore two sides to seeing sport as performance. Sports join knowledge

this time, we can achieve a high-pitched felicity, involvement, or flow,

to illustrate how theory and rich empirical accounts work together in

Outline of the Book

psychological identification with the bodily actions and gendered meaning

4. Caillois (1958/1979), Geertz (1973a), Goffman (1961), and Huizinga

them.” Butler’s actors either reproduce or bend empirical and theoretical

Alexander, J. C. (2007). The meaningful construction of inequality and the

Beauchez, J. (2018a). Embodying combat: How boxers make sense of their

Connell, R. (1985). Theorizing gender. Sociology, 19(2), 260–272.

Dyck, N., & Archetti, E. P. (2003). Introduction—Embodied identities: Reshap-

Goffman, E. (1961). Fun in games. In Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of

Jijon, I. (2015). The moral glocalization of sport: Local meanings of football in

Messerschmidt, J. W. (2009). “Doing gender”: The impact and future of a salient

von der Lippe, G. (2010). Et kritisk blikk på sportsjournalistikk. Medier og idrett

Media, Sport Enchantment and Gender

Media and Sport Enchantment: Narrative,

Sport attraction, or in the wording of Romans “bread and circus,” can be

© The Author(s) 2020 43

This One’s for the Record Books: Game

A: It is all about making it to the playoffs. To paraphrase the leg-

made the Norwegian handballgirls an institution, “living in the present,”

A: History is written in Stavanger Sport Arena tonight. Not exactly

While Shankly represents a pop-cultural icon, Snorre is the Icelandic

join in the performative experiencing of sport. Making history is a pro-

A: This is, perhaps, the most important – it is the most important

It is not simply adult child’s play or commercial mythmaking, a hand-

A: Crystal clear instructions from the Norwegian head coach. If your

A: Sacrifice your lives!

Entering Enchantment: Sensing

the hammer has missed repeatedly. We have started hammering at

Transcending Time: Handball and Viking Warriors

A highly successful performance, whether in narrative recapitulation, or

A: Welcome back to Ostseehalle in Keil. It is a boiling atmosphere.

temptation to reveal current women oppression, with the historian’s incli-

The Generative Grammar: Cognitive

A: We will see if Spain gets into that pace, that aggressiveness we

B: I am hoping we will get to see a defense that moves sideways and

Table 2.1 The handball code delineates the sacred and polluted